CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dieter’s back slammed against the wall. He pushed off it, recovered his balance, jerked his shirt down over his head, and thrust his hands out the ends of the sleeves. Some portion of the shabby old garment ripped.

The trailing folds of Jarla’s skirt vanished out the doorway. Dieter realised he was lucky the door stuck. Otherwise, she’d have a bigger lead—although the situation was bad enough as it was.

He ran after her, out into the twilight. He hadn’t yet put on his shoes, and the mucky surface of the rutted street sucked at his bare feet. Passers-by and vendors minding their stalls and barrows turned to watch the pursuit. Shovels and sledgehammers cocked over their shoulders, a quartet of filthy labourers grinned in anticipation of an amusing altercation.

Jarla either heard or sensed Dieter coming after her. She peered about, then oriented on a big, balding, black-bearded man seated on the bench of a cart. By the looks of it, he was just about to drive away.

Jarla evidently meant to beg him for help. Hoping to speak first, or to yell louder and drown her out, Dieter gasped in a breath and bellowed, “Thief! Stop her! That whore stole all my money!”

“No!” Jarla cried. “I never did!”

But she was dressed like a whore, and not entirely dressed at that, and perhaps that prejudiced the carter against her. At any rate, he smiled an ugly smile and said, “The same things happened to me. Teach the bitch a lesson.” He called to his horse, flicked the reins, and the cart clattered into motion.

Jarla cast about, saw that none of the other spectators were inclined to help her either, and ran on. Dieter pounded after her, caught her by the hair, and yanked her off balance. She fell down in the mud, and he kicked her until she stopped resisting. Sobbing, she simply curled up to shield her most vulnerable parts.

He hauled her to her feet and marched her back to her stall. Some of the onlookers cheered ironically. He flung Jarla down on the bed and shoved the door shut.

As was so often the case of late, contradictory feelings and urges pulled him in two directions. He loved her, was ashamed of what he’d done, and ached to make amends. Yet at the same time, he yearned to go on hurting her, to punish her for defying him or simply for the pleasure it would give him.

He strained to suppress the latter impulse, and to his relief, it faded, although without making him feel as if his decent, rational side had truly assumed control. Rather, he had the odd feeling that the corrupted Dieter, born of dark lore and Tzeentch’s touch, had simply opted to humour him.

If so, perhaps he’d done it to illustrate just how impotent Dieter’s good intentions actually were, for it soon became apparent that none of his apologies or reassurances were having any effect. Arms wrapped protectively around herself, face ashen, tears sliding down her cheeks, Jarla just stared at him. Eventually he ran out of words, and then there was nothing to do but finish dressing and wait for the Master of Change to call them forth.

The summons came about an hour after night swallowed the city. A ball of purple foxfire appeared in the air near the door, then floated towards the panel, plainly indicating that it wanted Dieter to follow it out into the night.

He looked at Jarla and realised from her unchanged demeanour that she couldn’t see the luminous orb. “Get up,” he said, “it’s time.” He hesitated. “If you try to run away—”

“You’ll only hurt me again,” she spat. “I understand.”

That flash of bitter anger showed he hadn’t beaten all the spirit out of her, and he was glad. “I know you won’t believe this. You have every reason not to. But it really is going to be all right.”

The glowing sphere led them on a zigzag course through the darkened streets. He held Jarla’s hand lest she try again to break away, while other folk trudged indifferently past. To Dieter, the passers-by appeared less than real. He had the insane but persistent feeling that as soon as he took another step and changed his angle of view, he’d see they were flat, like figures in a painting.

Trying not to be obvious about it, he glanced around, looking for some indication that Krieger and his men were on his trail. They should be—he’d left the mark before proceeding to Jarla’s room—yet he couldn’t see any sign of them. Mouth dry, pulse ticking in his neck, he told himself it didn’t mean anything. He shouldn’t be able to spot them, not if they were sneaking with sufficient craft to take the Master of Change by surprise.

Eventually the orb dropped and oozed through a rusty iron grate in the cobbles. Dieter sighed. He’d hated his brief stint as an assistant rat catcher, but it seemed he was destined to wade through the sewers one more time.

The grate wasn’t locked or bolted down. The edges simply sat in grooves devised to hold it in place. Dieter stooped, lifted it, and shifted it aside. A stomach-churning stench wafted up from the darkness below.

Jarla winced. “Down there?”

“It will be all right.” The statement sounded more absurd every time he repeated it.

He gestured for her to precede him down the ladder. Before he followed, he took what might be his final look at the sky. I’m still bound to you, he thought. I never stopped trying to be a worthy Celestial wizard, no matter how it looks.

One small mercy waited at the bottom of the descent: a walkway set above the sluggishly flowing filth. For the time being, at least, they wouldn’t actually have to splash through the waste. Rats made a rustling sound as they skittered through the blackness.

He drew his belt knife and conjured a glow onto the blade to serve as a torch. Disdainful of the light, the darkness stepped backwards. The foxfire floated east, and once again, he waved for Jarla to take the lead. The ledge wasn’t wide enough for them to walk side by side, and it would be unwise to place her at his back.

After a while, she said, “We don’t have to stay in the cult, risking our lives in a cause we can never win. We can run away together. I swear, I’ll make you happy!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But right from the start, it’s all been leading here, no matter how I tried to abandon the path, and now our only hope is to try to find a way out the other side.”

The glowing orb abruptly made a right-angle turn and vanished into what appeared to be solid, fungus-spotted masonry. But when Dieter gingerly ran his hand over the wall, he found the edge where obstruction gave way to empty air. The hidden archway wavered into a blurry sort of semi-visibility when his fingers slipped inside it. The orb hung waiting on the other side.

Jarla took a deep breath. “All right.” She started in.

“Wait.” Dieter peered back the way they’d come and still couldn’t see any indication that Krieger and his men were on his trail.

Maybe they weren’t. Maybe they never had been, and even if they had, they might well have lost track of him by now. The sewers were a maze.

But he had to assume they were behind him somewhere, and likewise needed to make certain they wouldn’t miss the concealed doorway. Using the point of the glowing knife, he scratched an arrow on the stonework.

“What are you doing?” Jarla asked.

“Quiet,” he replied. He didn’t dare explain for fear that someone would overhear. Of course, it was entirely possible that the Master of Change was employing sorcery to observe him at this very moment, but he simply had to hope it wasn’t so.

“Now,” he said, “go on.”

Beyond the threshold, it soon became apparent they’d exited the sewers for a different sort of warren. The floor was dry, with no depression to channel muck. The stonework was manifestly finer, with carvings ornamenting the walls. Yet the catacomb felt even fouler than the filthy, reeking tunnels that had brought them here, because the taint of Chaos lay over everything. Dieter perceived it as an oily, creeping shimmer.

Jarla likely couldn’t see it the way a true magus could, but she sensed it, and despite her familiarity with the similar forces at play in Mama Solveig’s shrine, she paled and swallowed as if resisting a pang of nausea. “What is this place?” she asked.

Dieter inspected some of the graven symbols. “Dwarfs built it,” he said, “long before there was an Altdorf. But after they died out or abandoned it, another group occupied it, and cut their own glyphs alongside and atop the builders’ original inscriptions.” He recognised many of the newer sigils from the forbidden texts. “That second group served Chaos as we do.”

“I don’t want to serve it,” Jarla whispered. “I didn’t understand!”

“Just trust me,” he pleaded, “and keep moving.”

They walked on, and he sensed a stirring of arcane forces, visible only as a shift in the shadows that didn’t quite fit with the motion of his light. The manifestation swirled around them like a whirlpool, and, unliving but aware in its fashion, seemingly examined them from all sides at once. Then a touch, ephemeral as a cobweb but somehow noisome as dung, dragged down Dieter’s face. He stiffened, and, a moment later, Jarla cried out, no doubt alarmed and revolted by the same sensation.

“It won’t hurt you,” he said. “It’s just a defensive ward. It had to make sure we are who we’re supposed to be, but now that it has, it will let us pass.”

It did. But he wondered if Krieger could cope with such an enchantment, and do so with a minimum of noise.

Light flowered in the darkness ahead. Another fifty paces brought them to their destination, and the foxfire, its task accomplished, winked out of existence.

Peering about, Dieter found that the light of half a dozen scattered lanterns, inadequate though it was, sufficed to reveal that the long-vanished dwarfs had constructed a splendid temple to serve as the crowning glory of the complex. Interrupted by choir lofts and galleries, the walls of the sanctum sanctorum swept up and up to a vaulted ceiling. Unfortunately, the Chaos worshippers who came after had perverted and polluted this holy of holies even more thoroughly than they had the rest of the corridors and chambers. Made of the same congealed malignancy as the icon in Mama Solveig’s cellar, a black image of Tzeentch leered behind an elevated red marble altar equipped with shackles, and runnels to drain away blood. A curved jewelled dagger lay atop it, waiting for someone to pick it up and stab and slice a sacrifice to death.

Robed in pink, puce and purple, in finer versions of the costumes Mama Solveig’s coven wore to conduct their rituals, eight figures stood waiting in the vicinity of the altar. On first inspection, the Master of Change’s deputies looked like ordinary men and women, yet as Dieter had guessed, the cult leader himself was a mutant so deformed that he surely lived his entire life underground. For, even cloaked in the most potent spells of disguise, he would have found it impossible to walk the streets of Altdorf undetected.

That was because the size and shape of his body were entirely wrong. He was fatter than any human could be without his heart failing, and because he was too immense to close his robe, Dieter could see that his lower body had fused together to become a bloated, sexless, worm-like tail with clusters of twitching fingers growing out of it. The appendage would hump and drag behind him as he crawled about.

Above the navel, an extra head, small as an infant’s, drooling and weeping dark slime, lolled from the centre of a hairless, blubbery chest. The Master’s arms were too long and possessed too many joints, and an extra one grew from the left shoulder. The upper head, positioned more or less where a head should be but off-centre nonetheless, was nearly all lipless mouth lined with square, stained teeth, the remaining features and the cranium itself squashed together at the top to create an appearance of imbecility.

Dieter had sojourned with Leopold Mann and his followers, but even so, the Master’s appearance was grotesque enough to make him falter. Jarla sobbed, whirled, and took a first running stride towards the exit.

Dieter dropped his luminous knife and grabbed her. The blade clattered on the floor, and she thrashed, struggling to break away. “Calm down!” he whispered. “If you run now, they’ll kill you for certain! I won’t be able to stop them!” She kept flailing and kicking, and managed to jerk an arm free.

Then, however, the coven leaders rushed up to help him immobilise her, and of course she had no hope of prevailing against so many. They bore her to the altar, shoved her down on her back, and snapped the shackles shut around her wrists and ankles. She jerked on her chains, rattling them, wailed and sobbed, until, her hand lashing back and forth, a grinning female cultist slapped her into quiescence.

Dieter wanted to stop the abuse, but knew it would be suicide to try. He had to content himself with taking note of the key hanging on the side of the sacrificial stone.

He retrieved his knife, sheathed it, and approached the Master of Change. He dropped to his knees as he’d once knelt before Mama Solveig and the icon in her keeping. Up close, the mutant smelled like sour milk.

The Master put his right hand on top of Dieter’s head. Portions of his palm bulged, pressing down, then receded, as if, beneath the skin, tumours were swelling and dissolving. “I give you,” he said, the metallic shiver still underlying his otherwise human tone, “the blessing of the Changer of the Ways.”

“Thank you, Master,” Dieter said.

“Are you ready to take the next step in your service?” the Master asked. “Are you prepared to lead your coven?”

“Yes.”

“Then come with me.” The sorcerer led him before the altar, where Jarla lay shuddering, and the black draconic figure looming behind, then bade him kneel once more. The other cultists formed a circle around them.

Dieter realised with a stab of panic that they meant to anoint him a coven leader forthwith, and that the ritual would surely culminate in Jarla’s murder. He’d hoped for some sort of instruction or examination first, something he could protract to give Krieger a chance to arrive. But that obviously wasn’t how the Master wanted to proceed, and Dieter couldn’t think of any way to deflect him from his course. He could only pray that the ceremony was a lengthy one.

As it turned out, the preliminaries, a series of chanted prayers and catechisms, did take a while. The obscene import of the declarations and the corrosive power radiating from Tzeentch’s statue ground at Dieter’s mind, churned his guts, and made his head swim. But he’d learned to endure such things, and so far at least, managed to prevent them from drowning his will and sense of purpose. Glancing from the corner of his eye, he kept on watching and listening for Krieger.

Who failed to appear.

“Now rise,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter stood up. Someone took his cloak and helped him into a vestment of tangled, sickly colours.

“Now take your place behind the altar.”

Dieter mounted the dais. Tzeentch leered down at him.

When Dieter turned and looked back at the Master and his lieutenants, he felt a sudden wild surge of hope, because a murky figure stood in the gloom at the rear of the chamber, where the light of the lanterns failed. But then he saw it was the priest.

“Now take up the blade,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter did that, too. The dagger was well balanced and looked razor-sharp. A tangible malice stirred inside it like a cat stretching.

“Can you feel the power in it?” the Master asked. “It’s an ancient, sacred instrument. It’s sent souls beyond counting to feed and serve our lord. Now lift it up and strike.”

Her eyes wide, Jarla stared up at him. “Please don’t,” she whimpered, “please don’t.”

I don’t want to, he thought, but even as he silently articulated the words, they abruptly felt like a lie.

How dare she beg him to risk his own life on her behalf when she herself had guided him to Mama Solveig and so bore responsibility for all that followed? When he was a wizard of the Celestial College and she was a despicable Chaos worshipper and a common whore? When, in all likelihood, any effort he made to save her would merely doom them both? For he couldn’t prevail in a fight against the Master of Change and seven other warlocks too.

No, better to stick her in the heart and in so doing, at least preserve the hope of saving himself, especially when it would have the added benefit of putting an end to her constant whining need for reassurance. More than that, he realised that it would be like yanking out a rotten tooth. By destroying her, he would finally eliminate an aching, troublesome part of himself. What a relief that would be!

He swung the dagger high over his head, and as he drew himself up tall, he chanced to look out into the chamber once again.

All the spectators, cultists and phantom priest alike, were smirking at him with absolute confidence in their eyes. No doubt, at his back, Tzeentch was doing the same. They were positive they knew what he was about to do. Positive he didn’t have a choice.

Somehow their gloating certainty shifted the balance inside him, twisting the anger he’d momentarily felt towards Jarla into a need for defiance. He threw the dagger over the altar at the Master of Change. He was no warrior, the curved knife wasn’t meant for throwing, and it clanked down well short of its target. Still, the effect was salutary, as the cultists gaped at him in shock. It was a moment to savour, no matter what happened next.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going to do it.” He lifted the key from its hook.

“You’re insane,” said the Master of Change.

Dieter laughed. “Absolutely. For weeks now.” He unlocked one manacle, then pressed the key into Jarla’s hand. She could open the other shackles herself. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the sorcerers for even a moment if it wasn’t necessary. “But even a madman can see this is stupid. How can the Red Crown ever accomplish anything if it slaughters its own adherents?”

“The whore is of no importance,” the Master said, “except to provide a test for you.” Agitation made the fingers protruding from the worm-like tail twitch more rapidly.

“That statement is stupid, too,” Dieter said. Jarla sat up on the altar and started freeing her ankles. “She does her part and is genuinely devoted to the god, which ought to make her more valuable than me. I’m a spy. I infiltrated your filthy conspiracy to bring it crashing down around your heads.”

The cultists goggled at him anew. Their consternation was so satisfying, so comical, that, for the moment at least, he didn’t even feel frightened anymore. Maybe a sane man wouldn’t have reacted that way, but if so, he was glad to be crazy.

“So you see,” he continued, “if you need a new coven leader, you should give the job to Jarla and sacrifice me. That’s the way it makes sense. Although I warn you, you’ll have more trouble chaining me to the altar.”

“Neither one of you is worthy to lead a circle of our lord’s followers,” said the Master of Change, “and accordingly, neither one of you can be allowed to leave here alive. Kill them!”

The cultists started chanting and sweeping their hands through mystic passes. Jarla scrambled down from the altar, and Dieter shoved her towards the edge of the dais. He wanted her to scurry around the periphery of the vault to the exit. If he could keep the enemy sorcerers occupied for a few moments, perhaps she’d have at least a slim chance of escaping. But he simply had to hope she understood, because there was no time left to explain, or for anything but combat.

He opened his third eye and glimpsed the multiple images that revealed an opponent’s intent an instant before he actually moved. That might enable him to avoid an attack or two. He visualised the night sky, rattled off an incantation, and wrapped himself in his armour of light.

Darts of shadow streaked at him an instant later, but the corona leeched the virulence from them, and they stung no worse than pinpricks. He realised that by rights, the missiles should have flown before his protective enchantment was in place, but his foes hadn’t worked their magic quickly enough. Perhaps, for all their power, they weren’t accustomed to casting spells in battle, whereas he’d had a taste of it as a journeyman wizard, and grown grimly familiar with it again in recent weeks.

It was another small advantage. Perhaps he’d even be able to kill one or two of the whoresons before the others penetrated his defence.

He spoke to the air, and a blast of howling wind battered the cultist who’d slapped Jarla. It caught her in the middle of an incantation, and the half-born magic, escaping her control, opened raw, wet sores down the left side of her face. Another sorcerer sought to snare him in a binding, and he sent the dark, thorny coils leaping back to net their maker.

His foes spread out to flank him and no doubt get behind him if possible. He pivoted to strike at the ones on the right, and then, from the corner of his eye, glimpsed the Master of Change slashing his three hands through complex arcane patterns.

A thing resembling a huge black sea anemone, its shadowy substance made of dozens of fused, flattened, anguished faces like the countenances of the damned, wavered into being in the air above the altar. Several of its wire-thin tentacles whipped at Dieter. He tried to dodge, but they caught him anyway, stabbing pain around the edges of his face and lodging there as if they terminated in barbs or fishhooks. They jerked him up on tiptoe as though attempting to tear his own face away from the skull beneath for incorporation into the central mass.

He gritted out a counter spell, but it failed to wipe the hovering entity from existence. Heat seared his ribs; one of the sorcerers had managed to drive an attack through his protective halo.

It’s over, Dieter realised. The warlocks will pick me apart while I dangle here struggling to free myself from the anemone. Krieger, you treacherous bastard, why didn’t you come?

As though in answer to his silent reproach, gunfire banged, the reports echoing from the high stone walls. Someone screamed.