CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“You’re sure this is genuine?” Gerhard asked. Von Karien nodded, the flickering of firelight in the grate of Rudi’s chamber in the Templars’ Court deepening the shadows around his face, and imparting an uncharacteristic glow to his normally pale features.

“It certainly appears to be. It’s old without a doubt, and the text is a close match for the known fragments.”

“The known fragments of what?” Rudi asked, and Gerhard glanced in his direction.

“Theodoric’s manuscript. It’s been copied many times over the centuries, no doubt being pared down to just the passages that the transcriber understood in the process, until little remained in circulation but a handful of spells, passed from witch to witch.” Von Karien nodded again.

“That’s all I’d assumed it was, when we recovered it from one of the Silver Wheel covens we raided last month. I never thought to look at it more closely. If Rudi hadn’t found it when he did, we might never have realised it was the original.”

“Or at least a full copy,” Gerhard said. He frowned, looking troubled. “This ritual seems like a promising place to start, but it also confirms what we most feared. Greta Reifenstahl, or her associates, are definitely planning something.”

“Then we need to act quickly,” von Karien urged. “Having the book in our hands should spike their guns nicely, at any rate.”

“Unless they’ve already copied the parts they need,” Gerhard pointed out.

“All the more reason to get on with things,” Rudi said, remembering Hanna’s whispered words in the temple. The others were only speculating, but he knew for certain that Greta was planning something dangerous. Or had Hanna really meant to warn him about the witch hunters? Perhaps he should stall for time, and attempt to delay their attempt until the sorceress had been able to carry out her plan after all… His head hummed with confusion, made all the worse by his ever-present headache.

“I agree,” Gerhard said, taking matters out of his hands once again. “Whether or not the Silver Wheel intended to use this ritual to liberate the daemon, we can use the same method to destroy it.” A thin smile appeared on his face, matching von Karien’s. “I have to admit, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from turning our enemies’ own weapons against them.”

After that, events seemed to move with bewildering rapidity. Clerics of increasing seniority came and went, poring over the battered book, and scribbling copious notes of their own, while the witch hunters held hushed and urgent meetings from which Rudi was pointedly excluded. Once again, he was gripped by the sensation of being thrust to the periphery of events, but this time the sense of frustration he’d felt before was absent. Hanna had promised that they’d meet again, and although he’d failed to catch sight of her on any of his subsequent visits to the temple, he continued to find the thought of her hovering presence reassuring.

So it was with a surprising degree of calm that he listened to Gerhard a couple of evenings later, while the man in black outlined the plan they were to follow.

“I can’t deny that it’s going to be tricky,” the witch hunter said, sipping a mug of mulled wine as he watched the snowflakes flicker past Rudi’s window.

Winter had gripped the Imperial capital in earnest, and the temple precincts were becoming overrun with the desperate destitute, hoping to find some measure of warmth and comfort in the home of the Empire’s patron god. The temple itself was more crowded than ever, the queues for alms only kept sullenly restive by the conspicuous presence of heavily armed templars, and on a couple of his forays to pray there Rudi had stumbled over beggars who had somehow managed to make their way out of the public areas and into the warren of byways connecting the peripheral buildings. What had happened to them, he had no idea. They were removed by the guards, he supposed, or had possibly frozen to death trying to find the way out again.

“I hardly expected it to be easy,” Rudi countered, “otherwise we’d have done it by now.” And he would have been off in search of Hanna.

“True,” Gerhard said, and sipped at the warming drink, “but at least we know what we’re doing now.”

“Which is what?” Rudi sipped at his own drink, feeling the welcome sensation of warmth washing through his body as it drifted down into his stomach. “I’m only the vessel, don’t forget. Nobody tells me anything.”

“How very remiss of us,” Gerhard said dryly. He sat down, in his accustomed chair in front of the fire, stretching his legs towards the flames. “I’m sure the daemon inside you would like to know how we intend to destroy it almost as much as you do.” The calm confidence in the witch hunter’s voice sparked a flood of conflicting feelings within Rudi: a fierce elation, which he recognised as his own, and raw unreasoning hatred from that abominable other that shared his skin. He fought down the interloper’s emotions almost reflexively, and nodded.

“I take your point,” he said, more calmly than he would have thought possible. “So what can you tell me?” Gerhard looked at him thoughtfully.

“Only that it appears to be possible,” he said. “The ritual you found so fortuitously in that book should enable us to separate your soul from the essence of the daemon. After that, a conventional service of exorcism should be sufficient to banish it back to whatever hell it came from in the first place.”

“I see,” Rudi said, feeling the first faint stirrings of apprehension, although whether they were his or the daemon’s he couldn’t, for once, be certain. “And how soon do we try this?”

Gerhard smiled at him, in the bleakly humourless fashion that Rudi had grown all too familiar with since their fateful meeting little more than half a year ago.

“Tonight,” he said simply.

To Rudi’s surprise, after leaving his room the witch hunter led him away from the familiar path towards the temple, disappearing instead down a small side passage that he had always vaguely assumed led to a cellar or storage room somewhere. The snow was falling thickly around them, and even the sporadic gleams of lamplight from the windows they passed, or the flickering torches in their wall brackets, revealed little of their surroundings. Muffled inside his hooded cloak, for which he was more than grateful, Rudi glanced around in an effort to orientate himself.

“Where are we going?” he asked, completely lost.

Gerhard shrugged, an indistinct shape in the darkness ahead of him. “To one of the subsidiary chapels. You didn’t think we were going to use the temple itself for this, did you?”

“Of course not.” Rudi hadn’t actually considered the matter before, but now he came to think about it, it did seem pretty obvious. The ceremony, or whatever else Gerhard had in mind, would have to be held somewhere private and out of the way, far from prying eyes, especially if something went wrong and the daemon escaped after all… The shudder that rippled though him at that thought came from more than just the cold.

“In here.” Gerhard led the way through another door, larger and more ornate than most of those that Rudi had seen around the complex, but before he could fully assimilate the details of it the heavy wooden portal had slammed shut behind him, sucking him down into a welcome haven of warmth and light.

At first, Rudi was simply too busy doffing his cloak and savouring the cessation of the bone-chilling cold to fully take in his surroundings. When he eventually did so, he was unable to suppress a gasp of astonishment.

The room was huge and circular, and dominated by an altar to Sigmar at its exact centre. The carving and workmanship of the shrine was exquisite, easily the equal of anything he had seen in the temple itself. Even this paled into insignificance compared to the magnificence of the walls enfolding the small but grim-faced congregation, however.

Every square inch of them was covered in a finely detailed mosaic, depicting men and dwarfs of breathtaking nobility in savage conflict with the most bestial orcs imaginable, and after a moment Rudi recognised the scene as the Battle of Black Fire Pass. The only figure missing seemed to be that of Sigmar, and as he approached the altar, turning to take in every detail of the amazing panorama surrounding him, he discovered the reason for that. The god himself, still then in his mortal form, was behind him, standing guard over the entrance to this staggering sanctuary. At the sight of the incarnate deity Rudi felt the hideous presence within him quail, and his confidence grew.

His gaze travelled upwards, drinking in the ornamentation of the dome, which rose from the walls around them to enclose the whole space in a magnificently airy fashion. The mosaics continued without a break, chronicling the rest of the mortal life of Sigmar, culminating in the great twin-tailed comet that blazed across the centre of the dome. The whole space beneath it was lit by gently swinging lamps, depending from chains fixed into the ceiling so cunningly that their very presence seemed a part of the overall design, like stars surrounding and illuminating the comet itself.

“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” Gerhard asked quietly. Rudi nodded.

“I never knew anything like this existed,” he said. “Not even in…” He broke off, suddenly sure of where they were, but not quite able to believe it. “This is the Sun Chapel, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.” Gerhard nodded. “One of the most holy places in the whole of the Empire.” Looking around, his jaw slack, Rudi didn’t feel too inclined to disagree. The gold-plated exterior dome, which gave the building its name, housed the private chapel of the Grand Theogonist himself, and few others were ever granted the privilege of entering it. If the Church of Sigmar could be said to have a single spiritual centre it was undeniably here, where the man who led it came to commune with the Empire’s patron deity in person. The main temple, sanctified as it was, would merely follow the spiritual path that began here, at the altar in the centre of the room.

“Is the Grand Theogonist going to perform the ritual himself?” Rudi asked, his voice trembling a little despite his best efforts to prevent it. Gerhard shook his head.

“He has other matters to deal with.” The tone of his voice was enough to imply that in the witch hunter’s opinion there were none that couldn’t have been delegated with a little more willingness to make the effort. “And if things were to go wrong…” He shrugged. “Another difficult succession would hardly be in anyone’s interests at the moment.” Again, it was quite evident from his tone that Gerhard had little time for the internal politics of the Church.

“He has, however, pronounced his blessing on our efforts here this evening,” a new voice chimed in. Rudi took the proffered hand of a chubby little man in clerical robes more by reflex than design, and shook it automatically. “For that, we should at least be duly grateful.”

“Perhaps you’ll thank him for us when you see him,” Gerhard said, his due gratitude sounding distinctly muted.

“I’m Lector Markzell,” the man said, introducing himself to Rudi as if they’d met purely by chance at some kind of social function. Only his old watchman’s instincts enabled Rudi to spot the undercurrent of nervousness beneath the podgy clergyman’s veneer of relaxed affability.

“Rudi Walder,” Rudi said, as if Markzell hadn’t already known precisely who he was, and the lector nodded. Despite his air of evident good living his handshake had been firm and purposeful, and Rudi wondered how many people had made the fatal mistake of underestimating him over the years.

“Herr Gerhard has explained what we’re about to do?” Markzell asked. Rudi nodded.

“In principle,” he said.

“Good, then we might as well get started.” Markzell stepped back a pace and turned, gesturing to the rest of the people present. Rudi expected him to attract their attention by calling out, or clapping his hands perhaps, but such was the force of the stout little priest’s personality that everyone fell silent at once, and began to take up what were clearly prearranged positions around the room. Markzell turned back to Rudi. “If you would care to make yourself as comfortable as you can on the steps of the altar? Anywhere you like, it shouldn’t matter.”

“Right.” Rudi turned to follow the lector’s instructions, and found Gerhard barring his way. He was about to push past, when, to his surprise, the witch hunter took him by the arm.

“Sigmar bless and keep you, Rudi,” he said quietly. By the time Rudi had got over his astonishment enough to respond, Gerhard had already turned away and gone to join the pair of templars flanking the ornately carved door of the shrine.

Perhaps it was because of this that Rudi sat where he did, facing the giant icon of Sigmar himself, the stern visage of the god gazing down at him from his vantage point over the portal. Or perhaps he would have done so anyway, drawing comfort from the deity’s protection. In either case, it was a decision that was to save his life before the hour was out.