The Enemy Within (8 page)

The colours in the water took on definition until they formed
a recognisable image. A man and a woman, both tall, slender and blond, lay on
their sides in a canopy bed. The man was facing his companion, but she had her
back to him. Though the room was dark, enough light leaked through the curtains
to reveal the butterflies and roses in the tapestry on the wall.

Dieter caught his breath in surprise. He was looking at his
parents as they’d appeared long before their deaths, when he himself was a
child.

“I know you can never forgive me,” his mother said.

“I can and do,” his father replied.

“How?” she spat. “I betrayed you! I gave birth to an
abomination and passed it off as your son!”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “It was ten years ago, and
back then, I was unfaithful, too. So the way I see it, Dieter isn’t just the
punishment for your sins but for mine as well. The important thing is, the
Celestial College will take him. We don’t have to live under the same roof with
him or even see him again.”

“This never happened,” Dieter said.

“Were you privy to what they whispered to one another in
bed?” asked the priest.

“It can’t have happened! They didn’t fear or despise magic.
They sent me to Altdorf because I wanted and needed to go.”

“Just watch,” said the priest.

The scene in the water dissolved into drifting colours, which
then flowed together and sharpened to present a new picture. The adolescent
Dieter, clad in the blue-trimmed garb of an apprentice of his order, rapped on a
familiar door.

“Come in,” Franz Lukas answered.

Dieter entered his mentor’s study, cluttered with books,
taxonomic charts of birds and clouds, anemometers, astrolabes and other
implements of Celestial wizardry. With his brilliant blue eyes shining beneath
scraggly white brows, the elderly but still robust and energetic magician was no
less emblematic of his particular art.

“Shut it behind you,” Magister Lukas said.

The young Dieter obeyed. “You sent for me, sir?”

“Yes,” the teacher said. “You’ve come a long way in your
studies. You’re the most promising apprentice I’ve seen in a while.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So I think you deserve a reward.” Magister Lukas opened a
desk drawer and produced a small book. “Make sure no one else sees it.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the youth took the book and
opened the cover. “The Principles of Alchemy.” He clapped the volume shut.
“Master, this is the Lore of Metal!”

“So it is.”

“Are you testing me?”

“Perhaps, but not in the way you suppose. I know your
teachers, myself included, have drummed it into you that you must restrict
yourself to the Lore of the Heavens. Any human wizard who seeks to invoke more
than one of the eight winds of magic likewise opens himself to the Chaos from
which they derive, and must inevitably come to ruin.”

“Yes, sir.”

Magister Lukas snorted. “No. It’s nonsense. The false
rationale for a stricture imposed on us to keep us from realising our potential
and ordering all things to please ourselves. The best of us, the wisest and
boldest, refuse to wear such a shackle. We acquire knowledge and power wherever
we can find them. I believe you’re one of the best, or at least you could be. Am
I right?”

The young Dieter hesitated, then tucked the book inside his
shirt.

“No!” his older counterpart exploded. “I know this couldn’t
have happened! I was there!”

“Yes,” said the priest, “you were.”

The scene at the bottom of the pool flowed and became a view
of Dieter as a wandering journeyman mage for hire. Crouched behind a stand of
brush at the top of a hill, he peered down at the little dirt road than ran
along the bottom.

Singly or in groups, afoot or driving carts, laden with
bundles or chivvying sheep and cows along, people tramped by below. The older
Dieter—the real one, he insisted to himself—inferred they’d all been to
market and now were heading home through the deepening twilight.

Eventually a stocky man astride a black mare appeared. The
quality of his palfrey and his velvet doublet bespoke prosperity, as did the
neatly clad servant or clerk riding a mule behind him.

Dieter the journeyman rose, whispered words of power, and
thrust his arm out. Darts of azure light leaped from his fingertips to pierce
the horseman, who toppled sideways out of the saddle.

The mare kept walking. The servant reined in his mule and
gaped at his fallen master. Apparently he had neither noticed the darts flying
nor spotted the assailant on the hill, and thus had no idea how his companion
had come to grief. He was still staring when a second such attack stabbed into
his torso. He slumped forwards onto the mule’s neck.

Dieter looked up and down the road, then ran to the base of
the hill. He crouched over the body of the horseman, snatched his victim’s purse
and rings, and moved on to the clerk. He crooned to the mule to keep it from
shying away.

“No!” the actual Dieter cried. “None of this is true.”

“It wasn’t before,” said the priest, his voice now cold and
pitiless, “but it is now. Did you really think a puddle could shield you from
Chaos? Chaos is all-powerful. It can transform anything, even the past. Do you
perceive your memories changing?”

Dieter felt a churning inside his head.

“Your past made you who you are,” the priest continued, “so,
since Chaos can alter that, it can transform you into whatever it wants. As it
has. Go and take your place among your comrades.” He waved his arm.

Dieter turned and saw that somehow the monstrous army he’d
seen in the sky had appeared at the edge of the pool. One of the nearest daemons
had the body of a huge scorpion and the gurgling, cooing head of an infant. Its
drool shrivelled the grass. The entity next to it resembled a seven-legged
mastiff pieced together from irregular bits of brass and lead. No two of the
creatures were alike, and many, manifesting the same entropy infecting the
landscape, oozed and flickered from one shape to another.

“No!” Dieter said. “I’m not one of them.”

“Of course you are.” The priest scooped up a handful of water
and let it go. It fell partway, then froze, hanging in the air in a bright
streak that finally reflected Dieter’s face with the clarity of a fine glass
mirror.

He screamed.

The daemons grabbed Dieter by the wrists, to drag him into
their ranks by force or tear him apart for his recalcitrance. He thrashed,
trying to break free even though he knew it was impossible for one to prevail
against so many.

Then suddenly, it wasn’t daemons holding onto him anymore,
and he wasn’t standing in the pool. A woman peered anxiously down at him.
Disoriented as he was, it took him a moment to recognise Jarla, partly because
it was the first time he’d seen her face without its whorish mask of paint. She
looked younger, and more shy and tentative without it.

“Are you all right?” she panted.

Far from it. He was still shaking with terror, and his heart
thumped as if he’d sprinted for miles. He was also gasping. He laboured to
control his breathing, meanwhile insisting to himself that his sojourn in the
realm of Chaos had only been a nightmare, a nightmare that was now over, and it
blunted the edge of his fear. “Maybe.” His voice came out as a croak, and he
realised his throat was dry and scratchy. “Is there water?”

“Yes.” She went to fetch it, and as it gurgled from pitcher
to cup, he looked about. He was lying on the stained cot in Mama Solveig’s
infirmary. Up close, the bed smelled of sweat, blood and mildew. Shafts of
sunlight fell through the windows, and it appeared that except for Jarla, no one
else was about.

She brought him his drink, and, parched though he was, he
made himself sip it a little at a time, lest it make him sick. “Thank you. How
long was I unconscious?”

“Hours.” She sat down on a little three-legged stool beside
the cot. “It’s afternoon. Mama and Adolph had to leave, but I stayed with you.
At the end, when you were yelling and flailing around, I was afraid you were
going to hurt yourself, so I took hold of your arms.”

“Thank you,” he repeated. “You’re a good friend.”

She smiled and lowered her eyes. “It’s all right. Mama and
Adolph would have stayed, but they had to do their work. My job… well, you
know. It’s mostly at night. I asked before if you’re all right. Do you know
yet?”

He took stock of himself. As best he could judge, his
memories and character remained as they’d always been. Jarla wasn’t reacting to
him as if his body had altered in some freakish fashion. Perhaps he’d suffered a
frightening dream and nothing more.

Or perhaps not. He felt a strange feverish restlessness and
had a throbbing tender spot in the middle of his forehead. He told himself that
anyone newly awakened from a delirium would feel unwell, and that he’d likely
smacked himself in the face while thrashing about.

“I’ll live,” he said, swinging his legs off the cot and
sitting up, noticing in the process that someone, most likely Jarla, had removed
his shoes. “I have to say, no thanks to anyone but you, and even you weren’t
truthful about what was going to happen to me.”

She flinched. “I didn’t know. No one else has ever had such a
strong reaction. Mama says it’s because you have an extraordinary aptitude for
magic.”

“Really?” He hesitated. “In that case, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t
have spoken harshly to the person who took care of me.”

In point of fact, he actually did feel a twinge of guilt, and
had to remind himself she was a Chaos worshipper who’d turn on him instantly if
she learned his true purpose. It would be idiotic to regard her as anything but
a threat.

Or a resource.

Because it was plain that she liked him. He didn’t know why,
except that over the course of their conversations, he’d always tried to appear
friendly and never to show disdain for her profession. Perhaps, melancholy,
lonely, and dubious of her own worth as she seemed to be, that was all it took
to win her affection.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I can understand you being
angry. To tell you the truth, I was upset, too. I was afraid the Changer would
mark you right away, you’d have to go into the forest with Leopold and his
company, and then I wouldn’t see you anymore. Not until I change.” She sighed.
“If I ever do.”

Dieter peered at her. “Let me get this straight. You want to
transform?”

“Yes. We all do. It’s a blessing from the god.”

“Then why do you and the others keep the icon set back from
the area where you work your rituals? Why not bring it close and bask in its
power as much as you can? I imagine you’d change pretty quickly.”

“Mama says that would be impious. Like trying to force the
god’s hand. We need to worship as we’ve been taught. She says there’s a
practical side to it, too. Every servant of the Master of Fortune can’t acquire
his mark and flee to the woods, not all of us at once. He needs human beings
here in the city, to smuggle supplies and new recruits to Leopold, and to
discover the army’s plans and pass those along. I help with that part. Sometimes
the soldiers talk when they… spend time with me.”

“Well, maybe it’s because I lack understanding, but I’m glad
the god hasn’t got around to changing you yet. If he had, I never would have met
you, and besides that, I like your face the way it is.”

Jarla blushed. Dieter wondered how best to follow up on his
flattery, and then the door groaned open. Mama Solveig doddered through, looked
at her two acolytes sitting opposite one another, and smiled.

“Dieter,” she said, “awake at last.”

“Yes.” He pondered how to speak to her and decided that at
least a little resentment was in order. Any other reaction might seem unnatural
and accordingly suspicious. “I appreciate Jarla staying with me, but you’re the
healer. Why weren’t you trying to help me?”

“Because you weren’t sick,” Mama said, hobbling closer. “The
Changer’s touch is a blessing, not an illness. What did you dream?”

He hesitated. “A world where everything kept changing. Armies
of daemons.”

“And it was all wonderful and beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“Well… yes.” In a bizarre way, it had been. He’d just been
too frightened to realise until now.

“Yet there you sit complaining, just because you had to go to
sleep to see it. Don’t you realise you’re being foolish?”

“Maybe, but I never had a seizure before.”

“And in your place, I’m sure I’d be concerned, too. But I
doubt you’ll have any more. As I said, it’s not that you’ve fallen sick. You’ve
become one of the elect, and since that was what you wanted, I hope you can
forgive me for giving it to you.”

He sighed. “Well, I suppose. Why not, considering that I came
out of it all right.” The tender spot on his forehead gave him a twinge.

Mama Solveig smiled. “I’m so glad. I’d hate to think we were
mistaken about you, and you’d end up regretting it if I did. Do you feel well
enough to talk a while longer, or would you like to rest?”

“We can talk.”

“Good.” The old woman turned to Jarla. “Why don’t you go down
by the barracks, dear? Earn some money and see what you can learn.”

Jarla pouted as if she found the suggestion uncongenial. But
she merely said, “Yes, Mama,” and took her leave.

“She’s a sweet girl,” Mama said as Jarla pulled the door shut
behind her, “but Adolph could make a nasty enemy.”

Dieter hesitated. “I don’t want enemies. I want to fit in and
serve the cause.”

“Of course you do, and that’s one of the nice things about
joining the coven. Perhaps the rest of the world is against you, but you have a
family now, brothers and sisters who look after their own. For instance, Jarla
told me you’ve been slaving away for pennies catching vermin, and sleeping in a
hostel for beggars and tramps. We can do better than that. For the time being,
you can live here and be my helper in the healing trade.”