As he watched them lope, hobble and even slither on their
bellies in search of their prey, he had to clamp down hard to stifle a laugh.
Dieter stood beside the wagon watching twilight overtake the
forest and wondering what to do. One of the mules tossed its head as though to
convey scorn for his paralysis.
He felt the same way about it, or at least he had a restless
sense that he ought to be pursuing some plan of action, that he was in danger,
and it deepened with every moment he failed to put himself into motion. But
since he didn’t understand what had happened, it was difficult to formulate an
appropriate response.
Though he’d feared that once they entered the forest, Adolph
might try to do him harm, what reason could the scribe have had to kill
Lampertus? But if his companion hadn’t done it, who had, and either way, where
was Adolph now?
Should Dieter search for the cultist, who might be waiting in
ambush? Try to find the bandits, who didn’t know him and might not believe he
was a Chaos worshipper? Flee back down the trail, forsaking the errand on which
Mama Solveig had sent him and jeopardising his standing within the coven? Stand
guard over the wagon and its contraband, and hope either Adolph or some friendly
outlaw would happen along eventually?
Perhaps divination held the answer, and perhaps it ought to
be a different spell than before. That would maximise the chances of it yielding
insights his previous effort hadn’t produced, and in any case, with anxiety and
restlessness gnawing at him, the delay involved in going back down the trail
seemed insupportable. He swept his hand through a pass and whispered the first
line of the oracular spell he’d acquired from the dark lore. His forehead
throbbed. One of the mules brayed, and, straining against the wagon’s brake
mechanism, the team attempted to distance itself from him.
A javelin arced out of the trees and plunged into the ground
mere inches from his right foot.
Even so, for a moment, he kept conjuring. He wanted to finish
the spell, or perhaps, like a frantic lover unwilling to stop short of
consummation, it wanted to be finished. But then the rational part of him
screamed that more missiles were surely coming, that he was utterly vulnerable
standing out in the open chanting and flapping his arms, and somehow he mustered
the will to break off the incantation.
He dived to the ground, scrambled under the wagon, and
crouched behind one of the wheels. Guns banged and flashed, smearing the air
with their smoke. The barrage battered the wagon, cracking and splintering wood.
Beer gushed from punctured kegs. An arrow hit one of the mules, and the animal
stumbled and screamed.
The wagon provided insufficient cover, which soon would
become even less adequate: Dieter could make out darting shadows spreading out
to flank his position. He needed magical protection, and as soon as he conceived
the thought, Chaos whispered, urging him to invoke its power as he stupidly,
unthinkingly had before. Denying the impulse, he spoke to the heavens, and they
cloaked him in the halo that had shielded him from the serpent of fire.
Thus armoured, he shouted to his attackers, who, though he
had yet to see them clearly, he assumed to be the brigands. “Stop this! I’m an
ally! A follower of the Red Crown! I’ve brought you supplies!”
“Liar!” they screamed in answer, as well as “traitor”, “witch
hunter”, and “spy”. Then, as if their own clamour had excited their bloodlust
beyond bearing, they charged.
Dieter sprinted in the opposite direction. He hoped his
flight wouldn’t stop them from running close to the wagon, and, glancing back,
he saw that it hadn’t. As far as they knew, they had no reason to swing wide and
avoid it.
He halted, pivoted, rattled off words of power, and thrust
out his arm. A tongue of flame leaped up in the wagon bed.
The kegs of gunpowder exploded, and the fiery blast tore the
wagon and mules apart. Chunks of blazing wood and fragments of equine flew
through the air. Burning like a torch, a mutant with the head of a bird shrieked
and reeled. Squinting against the glare, Dieter couldn’t tell how many other
bandits the blast had killed or injured. Not all of them, obviously. Possibly
only a couple. But he hoped the blinding flash, deafening boom and sheer shock
would make the others falter and so enable him to increase his lead. Willing
himself not to flag—he was casting too many spells in quick succession, and it
was already testing his stamina—he turned and ran on.
He veered off the trail into the trees. He hated to do it. It
would be harder going, and the forest was his pursuers’ domain, not his. But his
only chance was to elude the mutants, and that would be impossible if he stayed
in the open.
Wishing full night would hurry and engulf the wood, he ran
down one slope and clambered up another. Behind him and to the right, the
raiders called to one another, some in voices so garbled or bestial he couldn’t
understand them. One outlaw fired a gun, and a companion cursed him for a fool
and told him to wait until he was certain he saw a target.
Crouching behind an oak, Dieter hoped that none of the
brigands could see him. He whispered another spell. A pang of discomfort twisted
his guts, as if he were feeling the effort tear another measure of his strength
away. But when he scurried onwards, he strode twice as fast as before. Fast
enough, he prayed, to outdistance his pursuers and shake them off his trail.
In fact, the ploy kept him alive and uncaught for a while
longer, until darkness shrouded the land, and stars gleamed through the few gaps
in the branches overhead. But eventually the enchantment ran its course, and in
its aftermath, he crouched exhausted, fighting to control his breathing lest
someone hear the tortured rasp. For, as the rustling brush and crunching dead
leaves on every side attested, even with his augmented speed, he hadn’t
succeeded in eluding his pursuers. Their superior numbers and knowledge of the
terrain had made it impossible, and now they were all around him.
He smiled a bitter smile. He’d struggled as hard as he could
and attempted every trick that came to mind. Now, he supposed, it was time to
admit his life was over.
“It doesn’t have to be,” said a baritone voice.
Dieter jerked around to find the priest standing beside him,
robe belt dangling, cowl pushed back to reveal the shrewd, sardonic face and
tonsured pate.
“Don’t worry,” the man in the robe continued, “the brigands
can’t hear me.”
“Because you aren’t real,” Dieter whispered.
“That assertion implies you aren’t, either.”
Dieter closed his eyes in the hope that when he opened them,
the priest would be gone. He didn’t want to spend the last moments of his life
mired in a hallucination. “Leave me alone.”
“To die? You wouldn’t want that. Over the past several weeks,
you’ve fought hard to survive. As you can survive again, if you employ all the
resources at your command.”
“Use Dark Magic, you mean. No. The spells I’ve learned
wouldn’t be any more effective than my darts of light and blasts of wind, and I
won’t end my life with that filth in my thoughts and on my tongue.”
“How perverse that even when your survival depends on it, you
refuse to recognise the bounty laid before you. The Master of Fortune offers
gifts far more precious than the small boons you’ve accepted so far. Even now,
it’s not too late to accept them. All you need do is extend your hand.”
“I told you to go away!” It took him a moment to realise he’d
shouted.
His eyes snapped open. The priest was gone, not that it
mattered. His outcry had revealed his position, and now he could hear the
bandits closing in on him.
It was frightening, but even more than fear, he felt outrage
at the utter unfairness of his situation, for by every star that shined in the
heavens, he was an innocent man! He hadn’t hurt anyone back in Halmbrandt, yet
Krieger had been able to control him just as if he had. Nor had he murdered
Lampertus, but the brigands were about to punish him for it anyway.
And surely the innocent had the right to resist unjust
treatment by any means that came to hand. Straining to focus despite his
exhaustion, he contemplated the spells and bizarre, paradoxical dogma he’d
absorbed from the forbidden texts, seeking some deeper truth that had yet to
reveal itself. A part of him clamoured that he was courting a fate worse than
being shot or hacked apart, but now, with death mere heartbeats away, the raw
animal urge to survive rendered the caution meaningless.
Words articulated themselves in his mind. He didn’t know how,
for they didn’t occur in any of the coven’s parchments, nor did he understand
their meaning, but he jabbered them as eagerly as a drowning man would clutch at
a lifeline.
Sudden as a lightning strike, power burned into the tender
spot on his forehead and on through every portion of his body. The sensation was
ecstatic and excruciating at the same time. Above all, it was so overwhelming as
to render thought or purposeful action impossible, and he jerked and stumbled
mindlessly in its grip.
Then the paroxysm ended as abruptly as it began, leaving
weakness in its stead. He pitched forwards onto his knees, and just barely
managed to catch himself with his hands to avoid ending up with his face in the
dirt.
He realised the blades of grass and dead leaves beneath his
dangling head looked different, although he couldn’t say precisely how. They
just did.
An exchange of excited voices and the tramp of footsteps put
an end to his dazed contemplation of such minutiae. The brigands had found him.
To be exact, they’d caught up with him at a moment when he
was too feeble to attempt any more magic or do anything else to defend himself.
The priest had promised Chaotic lore would save him, but evidently not.
Dieter wished he could die on his feet, but he lacked the
strength to rise. Still, he could at least demonstrate that he had the courage
to look at his killers, and so he laboriously lifted his head.
To behold three brigands. The one on the right, a woman,
appeared to have no skin, as if a torturer had flayed her. The man in the middle
seemed to have leeches attached all over his body, although Dieter assumed the
dark, pendulous masses were actually blemishes. The remaining fellow looked
normal, and maybe he was. Perhaps he was one of the folk who, according to Mama
Solveig, joined the outlaws because they couldn’t bear separation from someone
they loved.
Like the ground, the three bandits looked different than they
ought to look. At first, Dieter saw a dim phosphorescence crawling on their
bodies. Then, for a moment, the figures multiplied, and he beheld more than one
of each. It was as if, moving, they left phantasmal after images hanging in the
air.
The normal-looking brigand shouldered his crossbow and
squinted as he aimed. The leech man turned and shoved the weapon out of line.
“Don’t!” said the mutant. “Look at him!”
Look at him? Dieter realised the sensitive spot in the middle
of his brow felt different than it ever had before. Hand trembling, he reached
to examine it by touch.
“Does it matter?” the crossbowman asked. “He killed the
recruit. He blew up the wagon and killed and hurt some of us.”
“Still,” the leech man said.
The spot was moist and soft. A flap of skin flinched down to
cover and protect it when Dieter fingered it with any force at all. Now he
understood why things looked different. How could they not, when he’d grown a
new eye?
In other words, he’d transformed. His exposure to the icon
had started the process, his studies of Dark Magic had advanced it, and that
final invocation, which had opened his body and spirit to Chaos, had enabled it
to produce overt deformity. The realisation was so appalling that for the moment
it even blunted his fear that the outlaws were about to kill him.
“Well, what do you want to do with him?” the crossbowman
asked, a hint of petulance in his voice.
“Take him to Leopold,” the skinless woman said, the raw
wetness of her face glistening even in the gloom. “If we end up killing one of
our own kind, let it be because our leader ordered it.”
“He’s dangerous,” the man with the crossbow said.
“Maybe not anymore,” she said. “He looks worn out. Anyway,
you two can hold onto his arms and I’ll walk behind him with my spear, ready to
stick him if he tries anything. You hear that, warlock? I will kill you if I
even suspect you’re starting a spell.”
Dieter managed a nod, and the men hauled him to his feet.
Calling to their comrades that the hunt was over, his captors
half-marched, half-carried Dieter through the forest. On the way, a portion of
his strength seeped back, shock and horror loosened their grip on him, and he
realised that, even altered as he was, he still wanted to go on living. So he
strove to fix his thoughts on that goal only. There’d be time to grapple with
the full implications of his transformation if he survived the night.
By the time he and his captors reached the clearing, most of
the other brigands had gathered there as well. Even in the dark, the sight of so
many malformed bodies, no two alike, was too complicated and sickening to take
in all at once. It made his head spin, made him feel as if he were dreaming once
again of Tzeentch’s legions.
But this was no vision, and he couldn’t afford to stand dazed
and passive as if it were. He bit his tongue, and the stab of pain dispelled
that insidious feeling of unreality.
“Kill him!” urged a familiar voice. “He’s dangerous!”
Dieter cast about and spotted Adolph standing alive and well
among the bandits. He realised the latter took him for an enemy because the
scribe had murdered Lampertus and then laid the blame on him. Stupid of him not
to have guessed before, but then, he had been busy running and fighting for his
life.