The Enemy Within (7 page)

Adolph snorted. “It’s easy enough to explain. They had some
notion of the might of my sorcery. Thus, they all feared to confront me face to
face, and believed that only a daemon had any chance of overwhelming me.”

“I suppose you may be right, dear. I confess, I can’t think
of a better explanation. In any case, the important thing is that you and Jarla
must promise to be very careful from now on.”

“I promise,” Jarla said, solemn as a child.

Adolph shrugged. “I’ll watch my step, and the Purple Hand had
better watch theirs.”

“Good,” Mama said. “Thank you.” She looked at Dieter. “And
now, young man, it’s time for you to make your choice.”

“My choice?” Dieter asked. He understood perfectly well what
she meant, but an unexpected jolt of dread made him want to stall for at least a
few more heartbeats.

“Of course. We’ve trusted you with secrets that could send us
all to the rack and the stake. After helping Jarla and Adolph, you deserved no
less. But now you have to decide whether you want to join us in our struggle or
go your own way.”

“Please stay,” Jarla said.

He felt a profound reluctance to say yes, even though it was
for that very purpose that Krieger had sent him here. But he knew that, even had
he been willing to defy the witch hunter a second time, he had no choice. For
all their seeming cordiality, Mama Solveig and her followers would murder him if
he declined their invitation. They didn’t dare release him to speak of what he’d
learned, or, for all they knew, to join a rival Chaos cult.

So he tried to infuse his voice with a bitter fervour. “Yes.
I’ll join you. The agents of the Empire destroyed my life. They ruin everyone’s
life. Somebody needs to cast them down!”

“I’m so glad!” Jarla reached out, squeezed his hand, glanced
at Adolph and let it go again.

“We’re all glad,” Mama Solveig said. “So glad that, even
though it’s late, and a feeble old woman like me needs her rest, we’re going to
make you one of us right away. Please, take up the lights again and come with
me.”

She led them deeper into the cellar, while the shadows
slithered away before them. Jarla came to Dieter’s side. “Don’t be scared,” she
whispered.

“I’m not,” he lied. His pulse ticked in his neck, and his
mouth was dry. He peered, looking for anything that might provide some hint of
what was to come. He saw only the thick brick columns supporting the weight of
the building overhead, junk festooned with cobwebs, and rat droppings.

Then Mama Solveig halted, and twisted her arm and hand
through an intricate cabalistic gesture. As when she’d made haste to bar the
door, the sure, quick action betrayed no hint of swollen joints or brittle
bones, and suggested that her usual slow, unsteady, cautious way of moving was
merely a pretence.

Magic sighed through the darkness, and a patch of air rippled
as objects wavered into view. Dieter realised a charm had hidden them hitherto,
and the old woman had dissolved it.

The items were plainly intended to be tools for working
magic, albeit not the specially crafted implements employed by true wizards or
even their lowly apprentices. When common folk set out to practise the black
arts, they evidently had to make do with the sorts of knives, cups and censers
available in any marketplace. Only the wands and staves, meticulously shaped,
polished and inscribed with glyphs, looked truly sufficient for their purpose.
Most likely one of the cultists earned his living working in wood.

Loose sheets of parchment reposed atop a lectern, but no
books or scrolls were in evidence. The cultists had scrubbed a section of the
otherwise filthy floor to draw a complicated pentacle in red chalk. They hadn’t
managed the necessary geometric precision, however. Although Dieter didn’t
recognise the figure, any true scholar of magic would have perceived instantly
that it was either uselessly or dangerously out of balance.

All in all, on first inspection, the cultists’ sanctum
sanctorum seemed less impressive than Dieter might have anticipated. Or rather,
it would have seemed so to an ordinary man. But a mage, particularly a Celestial
wizard, sometimes discerned things imperceptible to other folk, and suddenly he
glimpsed traces of a sort of oily shadow clinging to even the humblest of the
implements assembled in the coven’s sanctuary.

It was the taint of Chaos, making his eyes smart, suffusing
the air with a carrion stink and twisting queasiness into his guts. But noisome
as it was, he thought he could bear it until he discerned the vague shape
perched on a plinth at the back of the area, where the flickering light of the
candles and oil lamp barely reached. At that point, the foulness overwhelmed
him, and he cried out and recoiled.

Jarla grabbed his hand and he jerked it away. Flinging his
arms around him from behind, Adolph seized him in a bear hug. Dieter struggled,
but couldn’t break free of the hold. Mama Solveig whispered under her breath,
touched his forehead, and his panic abated.

“Better?” she asked.

He swallowed. “Yes.” Not only was the instinctive,
unreasoning terror fading, the feeling of vileness was bearable once more.

“Now, you mustn’t feel embarrassed,” the old woman said. “The
first time is difficult for everyone. How could it not be, when what you feel is
the majesty of the god himself?”

Steeling himself to look more closely, Dieter saw that the
form on the cheap plaster pedestal was a black carving of a monstrous bird,
dragon, or amalgam of the two. Supposedly the Changer of the Ways possessed
forms beyond number, but was often depicted in this guise. The sculptor had
fashioned it from congealed dark stuff, undoubtedly poisonous not merely to
flesh but to the soul and reality itself.

“Don’t worry,” Jarla said. “You’ll get used to the way it
feels. We all have.”

He supposed they had. Otherwise, they would have dropped
dead, or turned into babbling lunatics. But it was difficult to imagine.

“Are you ready?” Mama asked.

Dieter reminded himself that, taint of Chaos or no, icon or
no, he still had no choice. Even so, he had to swallow before he could answer.
“Yes.”

“Then kneel and repeat after me.” He assumed the attitude
she’d demanded, and she put her left hand atop his head. “I, Dieter, renounce
all earthly ties.”

“I, Dieter, renounce all earthly ties.”

“To family and friend.”

“To family and friend.”

“To land and lord.”

“To land and lord.”

The initiation continued in the same vein for a while, as he
swore to renounce every sort of loyalty a sane man might profess. It didn’t
particularly bother him to do so, which prompted the odd thought that perhaps,
in recent years, he hadn’t truly felt committed to much beyond his own comfort
and advancement of his art. At any rate, except for the noxious psychic pressure
of the sculpture, he tolerated the process easily enough.

Next, however, he had to offer prayers and praise to the
Changer of the Ways. Fortunately, the litany stopped short of actually requiring
him to pledge his soul to the god. He wouldn’t have done that no matter what the
consequences. But the declarations he was required to make were sufficiently
blasphemous that no one could have articulated them without disquiet. He told
himself he didn’t mean them, that they were only words, but it was scant
comfort. As a wizard, he understood the power implicit in language.

At last Mama Solveig said, “Good. Now, stay on your knees and approach the
god.”

“What?”

“It won’t hurt you,” Jarla said. “It hasn’t hurt any of us.”

Shivering, soaked in sweat, Dieter knee-walked forwards. With
every advance, the malignancy in the sculpture beat at his mind like a hammer.

Somehow he made it to the foot of the plinth. There he had a
final invocation to repeat.

Afterwards, Mama chanted in a rasping, hissing language he’d
never heard before. The sound of it made his head throb until he thought he
couldn’t stand it anymore.

“And now,” she said, reverting to conventional speech at
last, “for the final consecration. Rise and kiss your new master.”

No! Dieter thought. He’d done everything else, but he
wouldn’t, couldn’t touch the icon. Better to spin around and try to fight his
way out of here. The powers of sky and storm would answer his need, even in a
basement. Better to run again and hope Krieger couldn’t catch him a second time.
Better to abandon all hope of ever regaining the life the witch hunter had
stolen away from him.

But even as such thoughts howled through his mind, he rose,
then bent over the statue. It was as if the prayers he’d recited, Mama Solveig’s
will, or the poisonous atmosphere in the sanctuary made it impossible to do
anything else.

As the statue filled his field of vision, he had the
elemented feeling it was swelling larger, or else revealing its true size: a
thousand times vaster than the tiny, ephemeral world he knew. He touched his
lips to its serpentine neck, and icy cold seared them.

“That’s long enough,” Mama Solveig called.

Dieter recoiled from the statue. His legs gave way beneath
him and he fell.

Dieter stumbled through a desert, with masses of granite
protruding from the earth and a range of mountains rising in the distance, and
moment by moment, everything changed.

Many of the alterations were small but disturbing
nonetheless. A dune flattened slightly, a pattern in the sand oozed into a
different configuration, or the striations in a pillar of stone darkened. There
was nowhere he could rest his gaze to escape the constant, nauseating crawling.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Periodically, change
happened on a grander scale. At the edge of the desert, the snow capping three
of the peaks exploded into clouds of steam. Then, closer to hand, one of the
standing stones melted into a feline-headed giant sunk waist-deep in the earth.
The titan glared, hissed and snatched for Dieter, but he scrambled back beyond
its reach. The creature struggled to drag itself out of the ground, and he fled.
Sometime after that, redness ran like streaming blood through the brown terrain.
Blades of coarse crimson grass jabbed upwards from what had been sand. The
columns of rock became vermilion trees, their branches bedizened with yellow
blossoms that smelled like sulphur and trilled to one another.

The universe had gone mad, and was stabbing its madness into
Dieter’s eyes. Unable to bear it, he lifted his face to the sky, the realm he
comprehended and perhaps even loved better than anything on earth. There, change
occurred in a stately cyclical dance, according to laws he understood, which
meant that in a certain sense, nothing ever changed at all. The heavens would be
his refuge.

That was how he needed it to be. But when he looked up, he
found the same inconstancy that prevailed below. He couldn’t even tell if it was
day or night, or if that distinction still possessed any meaning. At first, part
of the sky was bright without any sun to shed the light, while the rest was dark
and dotted with green luminescences—Dieter couldn’t bring himself to think of
them as stars—that both churned like eddies and flitted about like flies. Then
the whole sky turned mauve, with a white glowing square in the centre. After a
time the rectangle crumpled in on itself as if a gigantic invisible hand were
crushing it. At the instant it vanished entirely, a robed, hooded colossus
appeared where it had been. The immense apparition sat on a golden throne, and
legions of daemons, tiny as toy soldiers by comparison, grovelled before it.

Dieter cried out and tore his gaze away, and at that point
noticed his shadow. It was changing like everything else, and not just because
the light kept shifting.

Shaking, he raised his hands before his eyes. They were pale,
then olive-skinned, then mottled with sores. They had four fingers each, and
then the left sprouted an extra pair of thumbs. Inconstancy had squirmed its way
inside him.

He felt a sudden savage urge to gouge his eyes out so he
wouldn’t have to see such things anymore. But a mild baritone voice said,
“Please, don’t be foolish.”

Startled, Dieter jerked around, then screamed and flinched.
The speaker wore a simple robe belted with rope, as well as a cowl that shadowed
his features. He looked like many a common priest, but also like the
transcendent figure the wizard had glimpsed enthroned in the sky.

The newcomer must have realised the source of Dieter’s
terror, for he pulled back his cowl to reveal a wry, intelligent, human face.
“It’s all right! I’m not him. I only want to help you.”

Dieter swallowed. The action felt strange, as if the
musculature at the top of his throat had altered. “Help me how?”

“By pointing you over there.” The priest extended his arm.
Dieter followed the gesture and beheld a pool of water amid the writhing scarlet
grass.

The pool’s surface was still, nor did its silver-grey hue
alter even subtly from one second to the next. It was the one steady point in
the storm of change, and perhaps that meant it could offer sanctuary.

Dieter dashed to the pool and waded into the cool water. He
wondered if he should immerse himself completely.

“That isn’t necessary,” said the priest. He must have run,
too, to catch up so quickly. “Just look at the water and nothing else.”

Dieter did as he’d been told, and at first, it helped. The
pool didn’t change. It didn’t even reflect the fluctuations in the sky, or his
own face, for that matter, and his fear and queasiness eased a little.

Then, beneath the surface, streaks and blobs of soft colour
shimmered into being. He cried out in dismay.

“It’s all right,” said the priest. “This is something
different. Just keep looking.”

“Very well.” Why not? Even if the pool altered in some
ghastly fashion, how could it be more horrific than the transformations
occurring everywhere else?