Dieter hesitated. According to the principles of wizardry, he
should be able to control an entity he’d summoned no matter how it sought to
deceive and intimidate him. But in point of fact, he hadn’t completed the
ritual, it hadn’t functioned as anticipated, and he had little confidence in his
ability to return to his body without assistance. All in all, it made fighting a
daemon in its own world about as unappealing a prospect as he could imagine.
Yet sealing any sort of covenant with the entity could prove
equally disastrous. Daemons were infamous for the cunning malice with which they
often perverted such compacts. Bargainers discovered too late that the treasures
they’d acquired were actually curses, or that the seemingly token prices they’d
agreed to pay entailed the forfeiture of their lives, their souls, or the
slaughter of their loved ones.
Still, if Tzeentch really did mean for Dieter to survive this
encounter relatively unscathed, and if he was careful, bargaining might be at
least a little safer than battle, and the bleak truth was, now that he’d
recklessly landed himself in this terrible place, he had to try something. “What
do you want?” he asked.
“Oh, how about a memory or two? I promise not to take
anything you need. In fact, I’ll only extract material that hinders you, that
burdens you and slows you as you travel the Changer’s road.”
“In other words, memories that buttress my sense of the man I
truly am.”
The priest smiled. “If your identity is so fragile that the
loss of a few moments will annihilate it, then you might as well give it up
now.”
“Promise me I’ll still remember my identity and my mission.
That I’ll still possess all my magic, skills and faculties. That I’ll remain
just as capable as I am now.”
“Didn’t I just guarantee as much? But very well. I agree to
all your conditions. I swear by the Changer of the Ways. Now do we have a
bargain?”
Dieter noticed he was breathing hard and struggled to control
it. He flinched from the thought of trading away even a tiny portion of himself.
But he feared it was necessary, and besides, a part of him, the part that grew
stronger every day, wanted to learn the spell the priest had promised. He craved
it as he’d come to hunger for every new piece of dark lore, no matter what it
cost him.
“All right,” he said, “I agree. But no tricks!”
The priest chuckled. “I believe we already stipulated that.
The way you keep harping on it, a person might almost imagine you’re afraid.” He
advanced to within arm’s reach. “If you’ll allow me?” He raised his hand and
touched his fingertips to Dieter’s temple.
Pain ripped through Dieter’s head. He cried out and stumbled.
“I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable,” said the priest, “but at
least it’s quick. Certainly quicker than squinting and puzzling over a musty old
grimoire for days on end. Now go home and make me proud.”
He shifted his hand to the crown of Dieter’s head and pushed
downwards. Dieter’s body plunged into the sand as if he were a tent peg, and a
hammer stroke were sinking him deep into soft earth.
Then the blinding, smothering grit vanished, and he plummeted
through a lightless, frigid void until that space disappeared just as abruptly.
He landed in his own world and physical body with what felt like a considerable
jolt, although, since pure spirit had no mass, he knew the shock was only in his
mind.
Mouth dry and heart pounding, he cast about. The lamb’s
carcass looked no different. The candle he’d lit didn’t appear to have burned
any lower, nor did the blood on his hands feel any dryer. Apparently his sojourn
in the realm of Chaos had only lasted a few moments.
He could feel the new knowledge in his head waiting to be
savoured and explored, but for once, something else took precedence. He had an
anguished sense of loss and violation, and with them came a stab of fear that
the priest had broken his promise and taken something vital.
He thought of his parents and his childhood. His training at
the Celestial College. Halmbrandt. His name. His mission. Jarla.
As promised, the contents of his memory seemed essentially
intact. The priest certainly hadn’t crippled him. Yet he couldn’t shake the
feeling that something precious was gone forever, and somehow, the fact that he
had no way of even guessing what the recollection had been made the loss seem
even more unbearable. He looked at the lamb again, remembered how he’d relished
hurting it, and puked.
In time, the sense of loss faded. Though it continued to gnaw
at Dieter, it loomed no larger than the rest of his countless worries.
He waited impatiently for Mama Solveig to give him the chance
to strike at her, and tried to believe his eagerness stemmed from his desire to
satisfy Krieger and go home. In large measure, it was even true. But he couldn’t
deny that he also yearned to cast the new enchantment simply for its own sake.
He’d spent hours contemplating the incantation the priest had planted in his
mind, but that was scarcely the same as actually experiencing the magic.
Finally, one night an hour after sunset, as he sat rereading
the forbidden parchments, Mama Solveig hobbled up behind him and put her hand on
his shoulder. “I have calls to make,” she said, “and then I thought I might stop
at the Four Dancers. I like the minstrel who’s singing there. Do you want to
come along?”
Pulse ticking faster, he turned his head to smile at her.
“Unless you need me, I believe I’ll stay here. I think I may finally be on the
verge of figuring out how to cast the spell that Adolph found without the power
turning against us.”
“It will be wonderful if you can. Well, there’s cheese and
baked apples left over from supper, and half a jug of ale. Go read by the hearth
if you feel chilly. I think this old hole is getting danker and more draughty by
the day!”
“Yes, Mama.”
She patted him on the shoulder, collected her basket and
shawl, and eventually hobbled out the door.
He forced himself to count to fifty, just to make sure she
didn’t turn right around and come back in, either because she’d forgotten an
item or thought of something else she wished to say. Then he sprang up from his
seat, put the pages back on the lectern, drew a deep breath, and declaimed the
first words of the incantation. A sickly-sweet smell suffused the air. The
ceremonial wands and staves clinked and rattled in their storage rack.
As he started the final rhyming lines, he braced himself.
Everything else he’d experienced as a result of his communication with the
priest had been painful in one way or another. It seemed unlikely that this
would be any different.
Yet it was. When the change took him, melting and reshaping
him from the bones outward, the feeling was so pleasurable he laughed
helplessly, as though putting aside humanity was the greatest ecstasy to which a
person could aspire.
Once that wild elation faded, he inspected his hands. They
were bigger and covered in black scales. His nails had lengthened and thickened
into talons. The icon leered at the transformation.
Because his hands were so different in and of themselves, it
took Dieter a moment to realise that vision itself had altered in some subtle
fashion. His third eye was open, and for once, it probably didn’t matter. Not if
the enchantment had altered his face as thoroughly as it had his extremities.
He felt his features to see if that was in fact the case.
Scales had sprouted there as well, and the lower half of his face had extended
slightly into serpentine jaws. His teeth were fangs.
No, it wasn’t likely anyone would recognise him. The trick
would be to keep people from noticing his deformities as he pursued his victim,
and the petty tricks that generally served to conceal his third eye were
inadequate to the purpose. He cast about for the hooded cloak the mutants had
given him, spotted it, and reached it in a single bound. That was wrong, and so,
he abruptly realised, was the half-crouch which seemed to be his new body’s
natural posture. He needed to walk like a man, and stand up straight.
He should also get moving before he lost Mama Solveig’s
trail. He donned the mantle, pulled up the cowl to shadow his face, and headed
out the door.
Head bowed as if by woe or weariness, trying not to shrink
from the gaze of passers-by, he caught up with the hobbling old woman easily
enough. Now that he was viewing her with his new eye, a purple shimmer crawled
on her body. If she didn’t sense his presence, he could attack as soon as she
was alone.
Unfortunately, he suspected she wouldn’t be alone any time
soon. In fact, the streets were growing more crowded as she doddered towards a
square notorious for its taverns, fighting pits and brothels.
Perhaps he could trust his cape and hood to protect him from the casual
scrutiny of one or two folk at a time, but it was unlikely to do so if he
ventured into close quarters with dozens at once. He wondered how he could
continue following Mama Solveig, and instinct nudged him to look I upwards.
For a moment, he imagined he was simply feeling the familiar lure of the sky,
the Celestial wizard’s fascination I with the heavens that, thank the gods, had
yet to fade no matter how he polluted himself with Chaotic lore. But that
wasn’t it. It was the rooflines that tugged at him, not the stars and clouds. He
surmised that was because the form he’d adopted could clamber over the tops of
the buildings as easily as it could traverse the streets that sliced and snaked
between them.
He scuttled into an alley, glanced about to make sure no one was watching,
then pulled off his shoes. They were I cramping his feet anyway, because his
lower extremities I had enlarged, also. The toes were longer, and their nails
were claws.
It turned out that scaling a wall was easy. He was stronger than he’d ever
been before, and his talons dug deep into soot-stained, decaying brick and
mortar. He reached the sloping, shingled roof in a matter of moments, then
peered down until he spotted his quarry.
Mama Solveig doddered on and he trailed her, springing from one rooftop to
the next when necessary. That, too, was generally easy. In the poorer precincts,
the builders of Altdorf jammed in their structures close together.
Suddenly, the midwife froze. She peered about as if she’d lost her way.
Dieter surmised that in reality, she’d sensed someone was
stalking her and was trying to identify her shadow. He crouched low and held
himself still.
But he needn’t have bothered. She didn’t think to look above street level,
and Dieter sneered at her foolishness.
She stopped twice more to cast about, and still it didn’t
occur to her to glance upwards. Meanwhile, her course carried her into darker,
narrower streets, where fewer folk were walking. Dieter worried that she’d
realise she was safer in a crowd, turn, and retrace her steps, but she didn’t.
Instead she hobbled into the enclosed passage, in effect a sort of tunnel, that
ran between two buildings.
Dieter dashed along the roof of the walkway. No one was in
the courtyard at the far end, which made it a perfect place to close with his
quarry at last. He poised himself to leap down on her the instant she stepped
out into the open.
Unfortunately, she didn’t, and eventually, he realised she
wasn’t going to. She was hiding in the corridor to waylay her stalker just as
she’d surprised Dieter beside the river.
Which was to say, she could have chosen a safer course of
action, but had instead decided to discover and confront whatever danger
threatened her and, by extension, the coven she led. It occurred to Dieter that
it was a courageous choice. It inspired respect, and with respect came
uncertainty.
He didn’t want to kill an old woman who’d been kind to him.
Who could say that it would actually force the Master of Change to reveal
himself? Dieter’s mind was sick and at least half-addled with desperation and
forbidden knowledge, so it seemed entirely possible that his plan was crazy as
well.
But no. Curse it, no. He wouldn’t fall prey to qualms and
misgivings now. Mama Solveig was a monster. She turned innocent people into
monsters. She’d turned Dieter himself into a mutant, or started the process,
anyway. She deserved to die, and even had it been otherwise, this scheme was the
only one he had, his last chance of regaining the life Krieger had stolen from
him.
Besides, it wasn’t really true that Dieter didn’t want to
kill her. A part of him did. It would revel in her destruction as it had the
lamb’s.
She was presumably peering out at the end of the passage that
opened on the street. He could take her from behind if he attacked from the
courtyard side.
As he crawled down the wall headfirst, he wondered whether to
assault her with a spell or brute force. In almost any circumstance, he would
have opted for the former. But if he ripped her with his claws, the manner of
her death would lend credence to the notion that some inhuman agent of the
Purple Hand had slain her.
In addition to which, he was curious to see how it would
feel. That, too, was a part of experiencing this new magic for the first time.
Planning to creep down the passage, he flipped to the ground.
Mama Solveig was at the other end of the walkway just as he’d expected. What he
hadn’t anticipated was that she was looking right at him. Somehow she’d finally
discerned or simply guessed where he was.
Dieter charged her, and she recited words of power. Though
she spoke softly, her high, quavering voice echoed in the enclosed space, with
each repetition louder than the last. She lashed her arm through the air, and
splinters of darkness hurtled from her hand.
Dieter leaped high and to the side, but the darts diverged as
they flew, and despite his attempt to dodge, one pierced his leg. He hissed at
the pain, and stumbled when his foot thumped back down on the ground.