“What happened?” She turned to glare at Rudi, her face a mask
of perplexity and horror. “What in the name of all change have you done?”
“What I had to.” Rudi staggered, reaching out to the altar
for support. He could barely believe it himself.
“In here we swear by Sigmar, witch.” Markzell had regained
his feet at last, suffused by an aura of power that made the hairs on the back
of Rudi’s neck stir. His voice had become deeper, more resonant, echoing from
the apex of the dome. “And his will is absolute!”
“Hans! Save Hanna!” Greta shouted, and the mutant broke off
his battle with the witch hunter at once, sprinting across the violated chapel
to scoop up the girl in his inhumanly strong arms.
“Put me down! Mother!” Hanna began to protest as the mutant
turned for the door, evading a final thrust from Gerhard’s blade as he did so.
Greta began to turn, clearly intent on following them, and then the world seemed
to explode.
“This desecration is ended!” Markzell bellowed, and the
chapel became filled with silver flames, rippling outwards from the lector, and
from the altar at which he stood. Hans, a screaming, squirming Hanna still
struggling in his arms, barely made it out of the door in time, howling as his
heel was caught in the wash of cleansing fire, and was instantly seared to the
bone.
Rudi cringed, anticipating an agonising death, but the flames
flickered around him without burning, seeming cool and soothing to the touch.
Their radiance filled the chapel, and as they washed over him, he felt a deep
sense of calm. Almost without realising it, his eyes were drawn to the titanic
figure of Sigmar, who seemed to be gazing back at him with an expression of
compassionate reassurance.
The priests, too, were looking at the icon of their god with
awestruck reverence. Gerhard had fallen to his knees, an expression of peace and
joy on his face, completely at odds with what Rudi thought he knew of the man’s
bleak and unyielding personality. Although he couldn’t be sure, as he strained
his eyes to see through the flickering luminescence surrounding him, he thought
he could see the figures of the immolated priest and the mutated templar as
well, restored to their former selves, standing with their comrades for a moment
or two, before vanishing entirely in a soundless burst of light.
An agonised scream, which seemed to go on forever, wrenched
his attention back to his surroundings from the vision of blissful peace he’d
been gifted with. Unlike everyone else in the chapel, Greta wasn’t being
protected from the full effect of the affronted god’s wrath. The fire was
consuming her, from the inside out, burning cold through her eyes and mouth in
streamers of blue-white flame. As Rudi watched, she dwindled, like melting
candle wax, hissing and falling to the floor, where, in a handful of seconds,
she was consumed utterly, vanishing as if she had never been.
A moment later the mystical fire began to diminish, and the
chapel began to take on its everyday appearance. It was still as magnificent as
it had always been, but somehow, Rudi knew, it would always seem pale and tawdry
now, to those few who had been here tonight and seen it touched by the hand of
Sigmar himself. He could think of no other explanation for what had happened.
Markzell took a deep, shaky breath, clearly profoundly moved.
“What happened?” The templar who Hans had struck down, and
who Rudi had assumed to be mortally wounded, was stirring and climbing to his
feet, an expression of bewilderment in his eyes. The mosaic behind him was clean
and unmarred. As he looked around the chapel, Rudi suddenly realised that all
the damage inflicted in the battle had disappeared, along with the bodies of the
fallen, leaving not a trace of the momentous events that had transpired here. “I
thought I saw…” he shook his head, bemused.
“You saw a miracle,” Gerhard said, trying hard to regain his
usual composure. He looked across at Markzell. “Is it done?”
“No.” Markzell shook his head. “I never got to complete the
separation, let alone the banishment. The daemon just vanished.”
“Then what happened to it?” Gerhard demanded. Rudi looked at
him wearily.
“It’s back where it started,” he said, trying to ignore the
flare of malicious amusement in the old familiar corner of his being where the
parasite dwelt. “Inside me.” He met the witch hunter’s uncomprehending stare
with blank resignation. “I had to take it back. It was the only way to
prevent…” His voice trailed away. The consequences of not having done so would
have been unthinkable, and he still didn’t dare to contemplate them. Gerhard
nodded soberly.
“Thank Sigmar you did,” he said.
“Can we attempt the ritual again?” Markzell asked. Gerhard
shook his head, working out the full implications of this final twist of fate in
his mind.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” he replied bleakly.
“So the book was a trap,” von Karien said, his voice bleaker
than the snowstorm that continued to flurry around their heads as they plodded
wearily back to Rudi’s lodgings. Every templar in the complex had turned out to
hunt for Hanna and Hans, the moment the alarm had been raised, and von Karien
had headed straight for the Sun Chapel to find out for himself exactly what had
been going on. Gerhard nodded his head in agreement, coming to the end of a
terse summary of the apocalyptic events of barely an hour before.
“Obviously we were meant to find it, and make use of the
ritual it contained. Allowing the daemon to manifest on consecrated ground
weakened the aura of sanctity enough for the witch to enter the chapel and
invoke the power of her own blasphemous god, even in a place blessed by Sigmar,
himself. If we hadn’t prepared the way for her, she would never have been able
to cross the threshold.”
“Then it’s all my fault,” Rudi said, his heart colder than
the flensing wind that tugged eagerly at his cloak. “If I hadn’t insisted on
reading those papers, none of this would have happened.”
“It would have been brought to our attention some other way,”
von Karien said shortly. “You can be sure of that. If they were willing to
sacrifice a dozen of their own people just to make sure the damned book fell
into our hands, they wouldn’t have just left it to chance that we’d find what we
were looking for in there.”
“One of the cultists we brought in with it would have been
told just enough to point us in the right direction after sufficient
persuasion,” said Gerhard. “All you did was bring things to a head a few days
earlier than they would have otherwise.”
“What exactly would have happened if she’d managed to kill
the daemon?” Rudi asked, still trying to comprehend the enormity of what Greta
had hoped to achieve. Like everyone else in the Empire, he’d heard whispers
about the malign influence of Chaos all his life, and his recent first-hand
dealings with its agents had opened his eyes to the reality of the threat it
represented, but its true magnitude seemed too great for the human mind to
grasp. “I know it had something to do with desecrating the chapel, but I don’t
see how that would have tainted the whole Empire.” Or perhaps he didn’t want to
see it, he told himself bleakly, still clinging to some vestige of hope that
Hanna hadn’t fully understood what it was that she’d been helping to bring
about.
“The chapel would have been re-consecrated to her own dark
deity,” Gerhard said, “and the taint would have spread from there to the rest of
the Church. If she’d succeeded, every prayer to Sigmar in Altdorf and beyond
would have been twisted to further the power of Tzeentch. At least for a time,
until the True God reclaimed his own.” How long that would have been, Rudi had
no idea, and he suspected that Gerhard didn’t either, but even a handful of
minutes would have been enough to wreak untold spiritual corruption throughout
the Old World.
“Then we should give thanks that Rudi had the presence of
mind to realise what had to be done, and the courage to go through with it.” Von
Karien looked at Rudi with a respect he’d never shown before, “Few men would
have, I’m sure.”
“I had a little help from Sigmar,” Rudi said, feeling
uncomfortable with the witch hunter’s unaccustomed approval.
“That’s true enough,” Gerhard said. He looked at Rudi, an
expression curiously akin to confusion flickering across his face behind the
obscuring curtain of snow. Rudi had clearly been touched by Sigmar, aided
directly by the god whose temple he served, which meant that according to
everything he believed in, the young man couldn’t be a heretic after all. On the
other hand, he continued to harbour a daemon within him, one that would become
immensely powerful the moment he died, which meant that he was still a walking
embodiment of Chaos.
Rudi had little sympathy to spare for the witch hunter’s
crisis of confidence. He too was being torn apart by conflicting emotions. The
magnitude of Hanna’s betrayal was only just beginning to sink in, but that
hadn’t diminished the yearning he still felt to be with her. Somehow, that had
become mingled with anger and bitterness, so that he was no longer sure where
love and loathing blurred into one another. Sometimes he thought that she must
still be an innocent dupe of the Dark Powers, just as he had been, and at others
that she’d been a party to this monstrous conspiracy from the beginning, even
before they’d left Kohlstadt together. He’d probably never know the whole truth,
the point at which her Chaotic heritage had finally overwhelmed her, and whether
she’d fought against it to the last, or chosen to embrace it willingly in the
end.
“I take it there’s no point in attempting the ritual again?”
von Karien asked, narrowing his eyes against the flurrying snow.
“None at all,” Gerhard said. “Rudi accepted the daemon
willingly this time, rather than being an innocent victim. The bond between them
is indissoluble.”
“Perhaps that’s just as well,” Rudi said, trying to put a
brave face on the unalterable. “We can’t trust a thing in that damned book. Even
if we tried, Sigmar alone knows what else we might be stirring up that we
weren’t ready for.”
Despite all he could do to prevent them, his thoughts kept
returning to Hanna. How could he have been so blind? Gerhard had been right, his
feelings had betrayed him. Damn it, he’d known her mother was a Chaos cultist
when they’d gone off together; how could he have been so stupid as to trust her?
It was because he loved her.
Had
loved her, he
corrected himself hastily. Now he felt… He didn’t know what he felt. The image
of her laughing face floated across his mind, and suddenly all his old feelings
were back, as fresh as they had been when he’d first acknowledged them. Then
they were swept away by a fierce, passionate anger, and he wanted nothing more
than to see her burn as she deserved, the treacherous, conniving witch.
He breathed the freezing air deeply, grateful for the
distraction it afforded. Snow still lay thickly around the temple complex,
rutted to slush by the passage of innumerable feet along the most frequently
used byways, which were now becoming resurfaced with irregularly indented ice as
the mess refroze. Rudi and the witch hunters placed their feet carefully,
keeping their balance easily with the confidence of experienced fighters.
Preoccupied with his whirling thoughts, he barely noticed a
small group of cloaked and cowled figures approaching them from the direction of
the temple. Like everyone else they’d seen that evening they were heavily
muffled against the cold, and their gait seemed a little unsteady as they
slipped and slithered on the rutted ice.
As they got closer, Rudi heard them muttering among
themselves: just another group of clerics on their way to a service somewhere,
murmuring prayers as they went. He relaxed again, only then becoming aware that
his hand was groping for the hilt of the sword that no longer hung at his belt,
impelled perhaps by the memory of the disguised interlopers who had disrupted
the ceremony in the Sun Chapel.
It was at that point that he became aware of the words the
little group was chanting, and without any conscious thought he leapt into the
attack.
“Hail the vessel! Hail the vessel!” The phrase was
unmistakable, the very chant that he’d heard from Magnus’ band of cultists in
Kohlstadt and Marienburg.
“Rudi! What in the name of Sigmar—” Gerhard began, but his
protest died away, his weapon leaping into his hand. Rudi’s first punch had
dislodged the hood of the leading cultist, and the face revealed left his true
allegiance in no doubt at all, as its owner reeled back into a pool of flaring
torchlight. Thick black blood welled stickily from a nose, mashed back into a
visage ravaged by disease, pustules blooming across swollen and febrile cheeks.
“Templars! To arms!” Gerhard bellowed, moving up to stand
shoulder to shoulder with Rudi, and deflecting a downward blow from a rusted
knife blade as he did so. He caught the luckless cultist on the back-swing,
hewing through his or her windpipe, the body so swollen with corruption as to
completely obscure its sex. Von Karien barged Rudi aside, stepping in to impale
the man he’d punched on the point of his own sword, and the mutant monstrosity
folded, gurgling.
Despite the witch hunters’ attempts to keep him out of the
fight, Rudi found himself facing another of the shrouded figures. He parried
another knife thrust easily with his forearm, seizing his assailant’s billowing
cloak and pulling the cultist sharply forward. Off balance, the madman lost his
footing on the treacherous cobbles and fell heavily at Rudi’s feet. Rudi stamped
down hard on the creature’s neck, hearing a
crack!
like a dried twig
snapping, and the follower of Chaos spasmed under his boot sole.
“Rudi! Keep back!” Gerhard roared a warning, his blade
flashing in the torchlight as it reaped its crimson harvest of
Chaos-worshippers. Von Karien ran another would-be assassin through, and
suddenly the narrow passageway was quiet and still, save for the groans of the
dying.