Next came a ceramic jar, evidently the repository for some
poultice, ointment or medicinal powder. She rubbed her fingertip on the icon,
stiffening when a jolt of its power evidently stabbed into the digit, then
swished it around inside the container.
She proceeded in the same manner for a while, contaminating a
goodly portion of her supplies. Meanwhile, the entire basket was presumably
soaking up vileness simply by virtue of its nearness to the statue.
Finally she said, “That should do it, and about time, too. We
have a lot of calls to make, and these old legs can’t walk as fast as they used
to.” She recited a prayer of thanks as she bobbed her head and backed away.
When they emerged from the cellar, he blinked, and realised
it was the first time he’d been outside in the daylight since Jarla had drugged
him. The blue sky, breeze and mundane bustle of the streets seemed a bracing
relief from dark, enclosed spaces, secrecy, and abominations. But it lasted only
until he remembered the Watch, presumably keeping an eye out for a fugitive
answering his description, Krieger’s agents, spying to make sure he didn’t run
away, and the Purple Hand, quite possibly lurking about awaiting another chance
to strike at their rivals. After that, he felt vulnerable and exposed.
Mama Solveig clung to his arm. Proximity to the taint in her
dangling basket made his forehead itch. Her neighbours called out greetings as
she passed, and she responded as if she were everyone’s doting granny.
At length they reached their first stop, a brick boarding
house as smoke-and soot-stained as the one in which she made her home. The old
woman looked up the shadowy stairwell and sighed. “This is the part that’s a
trial. All the climbing up and down.”
Maybe so, but they tramped all the way to the top floor, and
she never called a halt to rest.
She tapped on a door, and a feeble voice called, “Come in.”
Mama Solveig led Dieter into a small room stinking of spoiled food and sweat,
and crammed with cots and pallets. A young woman with a small, skinny frame and
a distended belly lay on her side on one of the straw mattresses. All the other
occupants had presumably gone to work.
“This is Dieter, my new helper,” Mama Solveig said. “Dieter,
this is Sophie.”
“Hello,” Sophie said in the same thin little voice.
“Help me down,” Mama said, and Dieter steadied her and
supported her weight as she lowered herself to her knees. “How are you getting
along?” she asked.
“It still hurts,” Sophie said, “and the baby kicks and
squirms and makes it worse. Is he supposed to do it all day and all night? I
can’t sleep.”
“Poor dear,” Mama said. “I’m sorry you’re having such a hard
time.”
Sophie shook her head, spilling a lock of wavy brown hair
over her eye. “I can stand the pain if I have to, but I can’t lose this one,
too. Is he going to be all right?”
“Let’s see.” The midwife began an examination of sorts, first
pressing Sophie’s abdomen at various points. When she pulled up her patient’s
skirts, Dieter felt a pang of embarrassment, and wondered if he ought to turn
away. But perhaps an assistant healer was expected to observe even the most
intimate portions of the process. Sophie must think it appropriate, for she
didn’t object. Or maybe she was simply too desperate and exhausted for modesty
to matter any longer.
Finally Mama Solveig said, “Well.”
“Tell me,” Sophie pleaded.
“I think both you and the child will be all right.”
Tears welled up in Sophie’s eyes, and she blinked to hold
them back. “Thank you!”
“Mind you, you must stay in bed, and you have to keep taking
the powder and applying the balm. I brought more of both.” She folded back the
lid of the basket and extracted two ceramic jars.
Dieter had understood the point of contaminating the
medicines and believed himself ready for this moment. Now he discovered he
wasn’t. Sophie seemed little more than a child, and the baby in her womb was
more helpless and innocent still. He yearned to grab Mama Solveig and fling her
away from her victims.
But he couldn’t. It would wreck his mission, and it was
inconceivable that a relentless brute like Krieger would agree that the good so
accomplished outweighed the opportunity lost.
“Thank you!” Sophie repeated. “I’ll drink some right now.”
Trembling, she pulled the cork from one of the containers.
Mama Solveig smiled up at Dieter. “She has a cup right here
beside her bed, and I see a pitcher in the corner.”
He fetched the water. The moment felt both horrific and
surreal, not unlike his vision of Chaos. He filled the pewter cup. Sophie took
it in her dainty hand, spilled a dash of grey powder into it, mixed the contents
with her fingertip, and raised it to her lips. Which, he supposed, made him a
poisoner. His guts squirmed as if he’d swallowed a toxin himself.
Sophie, however, smiled. Apparently the medicine had eased
her soreness, or calmed the agitated life writhing and thrusting about inside
her.
As he and Mama Solveig hiked back down the shadowy, creaking
stairs, Dieter struggled to hold his tongue. Even though they appeared to be
alone, it wasn’t safe to talk about the cult and its atrocities in public.
Besides, he was afraid that if he said anything, the old woman might discern the
depth of his disgust and dismay.
Yet he found he couldn’t contain himself Perhaps the constant
gnawing restlessness was to blame.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She turned her head to smile at him. “Understand what, dear?”
“If you transform a grown man, and he wants to stay alive
afterwards, he may well sneak away and join Leopold Mann. But what’s the point
of altering Sophie or her child?”
“I know, Sophie seems like such a delicate little thing, but
if she changes, she may be very different. Even if she’s not, the raiders will
put her to use in one way or another. As for the infant, it might grow up more
quickly than an ordinary child. Some of them do. If not, well, who’s to say
Leopold and his band won’t still be fighting a dozen years hence? We hope to
have our victory by then, but we can’t be sure. Anyway, altering folk is
worthwhile for its own sake. You might even say it’s a sacrament.”
“Even when it results in witch hunters throwing a newborn
baby on a pyre?”
“Yes, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You’d be
surprised how often it doesn’t. Parents are inclined to love their babies no
matter what form they take. If the child shows signs of being different, they’re
often in no hurry to call a priest or witch hunter to carry it away and kill it
any more than they’d rush to throw away their own lives. Instead, they ask a
trusted healer if anything can be done to reverse the change. Sadly, I have to
tell them no, but I do know a way for a sport to survive. Then they give the wee
one into my keeping, or perhaps they even accompany it into the forest. Leopold
has a few such folk in his band, mothers and fathers who couldn’t bear to
separate from their children.”
“I guess I see. Well, except for one thing: you betrayed the
Purple Hand to the authorities for trying to taint the water supply and change
people. Basically, the same thing you’re doing yourself.”
“Yes. The Red Crown had to choose the greater good. It’s
always worthwhile to spread the blessing of the god, but it’s vital to suppress
the Purple Hand before their doomed strategy places all our goals out of reach.”
She chuckled. “Or before they manage to suppress us.”
“Right.” He held the door for Mama Solveig, then followed her
stooped, hobbling form out into the sunlight.
The parchments usually reposed atop the lectern because the
cultists read aloud from them during their rituals and observances. But a
worshipper seeking to unravel their mysteries in solitude was welcome to do so
sitting down, and so Dieter carried both a candle and a rickety chair into the
hidden shrine.
Out in the front of the cellar, Mama Solveig hummed while she
crushed dried berries with her mortar and pestle.
Heart thumping, Dieter came close enough to pick up the
documents with their smell of old dry paper, then froze, paralysed by a sudden
acute perception of the filthy power seething inside them. Touching them now
would be like thrusting his hand into a tangle of adders, or thrusting a needle
into his own eye.
But he had to do it and do it quickly, before Mama Solveig
noticed his reluctance. He made himself take them up, shuddered, and sat down.
He tried to steel himself for the next and even more difficult phase of his
ordeal.
He now knew it wouldn’t be possible merely to pretend to
study the papers while avoiding comprehension altogether. If he didn’t
demonstrate at least a minimal understanding, his fellow cultists would realise
he’d shirked.
Thus his task was to absorb a certain number of
superficialities while evading actual enlightenment. It should be possible,
considering that the cultists claimed it was difficult to puzzle out the deeper
meaning of the texts even if one studied assiduously.
He shuffled through the parchments. Some of the pages were
vellum and some, linen. He noted a variety of inks, hands and scripts. As best
he could judge, he was looking at a minimum of six different manuscripts written
over the course of the last few centuries.
He decided to skim the document on the bottom. With luck,
maybe it wouldn’t stab revelation into his head like the one he’d examined the
first time.
It didn’t, at least not right away. It proved to be something
of a metaphysical treatise, devoid of both the fervid exhortations and exotic
words that figured in the other work. Its vileness lay simply in its trenchant
argument that Chaos was not merely omnipotent but omnipresent. Order was only an
illusion, and thus, in the truest sense, the stable universe of mundane human
perception neither existed nor ever could.
Despite himself, Dieter gradually grew intrigued by the
elegance of the author’s syllogisms even as he was repelled by their
conclusions. But more than that, he was curious. As far as he could tell, the
essay didn’t contain even a hint as to how one might go about actually
performing Dark Magic, and come to think of it, the text he’d read previously
hadn’t, either.
And thank the stars for that! It would protect him. Yet he
knew the papers truly must contain such instruction, because Mama Solveig and
Adolph had benefited from it, and he couldn’t help wondering how such a thing
could be. As any true scholar would, he felt a yen to solve the trick of the
concealment. Was it possible it would be safe to do so if he stopped with that,
and refrained from actually poring over the secret content?
He reread the treatise, more attentively this time, then took
up the next document, in its essence a rambling, disjointed paean of praise to
Tzeentch.
He read every text, then started over. His eyes smarted, and
he tried to blink the discomfort away. The skin on his forehead crawled, and he
rubbed it.
So gradually that at first he imagined his eyes were merely
playing tricks on him, certain words, syllables and individual letters became
more prominent, as if rising slightly from the page while the surrounding text
sank into it. Enough, he thought. That’s how it works. I understand now, and I
should break away. But it seemed only natural to run his eyes over the
emphasised characters and decipher the message they’d picked out.
It proved to be a set of instructions for evoking and reading
portents, signs that would speak clearly whether a mage stood beneath the open
sky or not, because the spell drew its strength not from the Blue Wind but
rather a force abundant everywhere. The possibilities would have excited any
astromancer, and Dieter was no exception. He murmured the words of power and
stretched out his hand.
A clot of shadow writhed into being in his palm. It was cold
and soft, and felt like squirming snow. For a heartbeat it resembled a living
creature, a knot of coils not unlike Tzeentch’s icon, and then it flowed into a
firm and static form, arms extending in a circle from a central hub to make a
wheel, and glyphs hanging at various points on the radii.
Which was to say, it resembled a horoscope, and though the
symbols were unfamiliar to him, as he stared, he began to discern the
significance of the pattern: Destruction. Betrayal. Degradation. Damnation.
Alarmed, he cried out and flailed his arm, and his creation
vanished.
Something glowed at the bottom edge of his vision. He glanced
down to behold the characters on the parchments shining with their own
luminescence.
“You see?” asked a baritone voice. Dieter jerked his head
around. The hooded priest from his vision stood next to Tzeentch. “You can’t get
away from it. The only reasonable course is to wallow in it.”
Dieter screamed, recoiled, and somehow managed to overturn
his chair. Crashing down on the floor knocked some of the panic out of him. As
he scrambled to his knees, he still felt frightened, but he also drew breath and
raised his hands to cast darts of light.
But he didn’t need to. The priest had disappeared, and the
ink on the parchments had stopped shining.
He drew a ragged breath, and told himself the priest hadn’t
really been there. His imagination had played a trick on him.
It might have been more reassuring if he’d ever hallucinated
before. Or if he hadn’t just been filling his head with the outlandish but
strangely persuasive proposition that the distinction between reality and
nightmare was fundamentally a false one.
It occurred to him that Mama Solveig must have heard his
shout and the bang he’d made falling over in his chair. She must be hobbling
over to see if he was all right. He turned in the direction of her shabby little
infirmary.
She wasn’t there. At some point, she’d gone out without him
noticing, and that wasn’t the most disquieting part. It was dark outside the
windows. Several hours had slipped by while the parchments held him entranced.