[Warhammer] - The Enemy Within

by Richard Lee Byers - (ebook by Undead)

  Who failed to appear.

  “Now rise,” said the Master of Change.

  Dieter stood up. Someone took his cloak and helped him into a vestment of tangled, sickly colours.

  “Now take your place behind the altar.”

  Dieter mounted the dais. Tzeentch leered down at him.

  When Dieter turned and looked back at the Master and his lieutenants, he felt a sudden wild surge of hope, because a murky figure stood in the gloom at the rear of the chamber, where the light of the lanterns failed. But then he saw it was the priest.

  “Now take up the blade,” said the Master of Change.

  Dieter did that, too. The dagger was well balanced and looked razor-sharp. A tangible malice stirred inside it like a cat stretching.

  “Can you feel the power in it?” the Master asked. “It’s an ancient, sacred instrument. It’s sent souls beyond counting to feed and serve our lord. Now lift it up and strike.”

  Her eyes wide, Jarla stared up at him. “Please don’t,” she whimpered, “please don’t.”

  I don’t want to, he thought, but even as he silently articulated the words, they abruptly felt like a lie.

  How dare she beg him to risk his own life on her behalf when she herself had guided him to Mama Solveig and so bore responsibility for all that followed? When he was a wizard of the Celestial College and she was a despicable Chaos worshipper and a common whore? When, in all likelihood, any effort he made to save her would merely doom them both? For he couldn’t prevail in a fight against the Master of Change and seven other warlocks too.

  No, better to stick her in the heart and in so doing, at least preserve the hope of saving himself, especially when it would have the added benefit of putting an end to her constant whining need for reassurance. More than that, he realised that it would be like yanking out a rotten tooth. By destroying her, he would finally eliminate an aching, troublesome part of himself. What a relief that would be!

  He swung the dagger high over his head, and as he drew himself up tall, he chanced to look out into the chamber once again.

  All the spectators, cultists and phantom priest alike, were smirking at him with absolute confidence in their eyes. No doubt, at his back, Tzeentch was doing the same. They were positive they knew what he was about to do. Positive he didn’t have a choice.

  Somehow their gloating certainty shifted the balance inside him, twisting the anger he’d momentarily felt towards Jarla into a need for defiance. He threw the dagger over the altar at the Master of Change. He was no warrior, the curved knife wasn’t meant for throwing, and it clanked down well short of its target. Still, the effect was salutary, as the cultists gaped at him in shock. It was a moment to savour, no matter what happened next.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not going to do it.” He lifted the key from its hook.

  “You’re insane,” said the Master of Change.

  Dieter laughed. “Absolutely. For weeks now.” He unlocked one manacle, then pressed the key into Jarla’s hand. She could open the other shackles herself. He didn’t want to take his eyes off the sorcerers for even a moment if it wasn’t necessary. “But even a madman can see this is stupid. How can the Red Crown ever accomplish anything if it slaughters its own adherents?”

  “The whore is of no importance,” the Master said, “except to provide a test for you.” Agitation made the fingers protruding from the worm-like tail twitch more rapidly.

  “That statement is stupid, too,” Dieter said. Jarla sat up on the altar and started freeing her ankles. “She does her part and is genuinely devoted to the god, which ought to make her more valuable than me. I’m a spy. I infiltrated your filthy conspiracy to bring it crashing down around your heads.”

  The cultists goggled at him anew. Their consternation was so satisfying, so comical, that, for the moment at least, he didn’t even feel frightened anymore. Maybe a sane man wouldn’t have reacted that way, but if so, he was glad to be crazy.

  “So you see,” he continued, “if you need a new coven leader, you should give the job to Jarla and sacrifice me. That’s the way it makes sense. Although I warn you, you’ll have more trouble chaining me to the altar.”

  “Neither one of you is worthy to lead a circle of our lord’s followers,” said the Master of Change, “and accordingly, neither one of you can be allowed to leave here alive. Kill them!”

  The cultists started chanting and sweeping their hands through mystic passes. Jarla scrambled down from the altar, and Dieter shoved her towards the edge of the dais. He wanted her to scurry around the periphery of the vault to the exit. If he could keep the enemy sorcerers occupied for a few moments, perhaps she’d have at least a slim chance of escaping. But he simply had to hope she understood, because there was no time left to explain, or for anything but combat.

  He opened his third eye and glimpsed the multiple images that revealed an opponent’s intent an instant before he actually moved. That might enable him to avoid an attack or two. He visualised the night sky, rattled off an incantation, and wrapped himself in his armour of light.

  Darts of shadow streaked at him an instant later, but the corona leeched the virulence from them, and they stung no worse than pinpricks. He realised that by rights, the missiles should have flown before his protective enchantment was in place, but his foes hadn’t worked their magic quickly enough. Perhaps, for all their power, they weren’t accustomed to casting spells in battle, whereas he’d had a taste of it as a journeyman wizard, and grown grimly familiar with it again in recent weeks.

  It was another small advantage. Perhaps he’d even be able to kill one or two of the whoresons before the others penetrated his defence.

  He spoke to the air, and a blast of howling wind battered the cultist who’d slapped Jarla. It caught her in the middle of an incantation, and the half-born magic, escaping her control, opened raw, wet sores down the left side of her face. Another sorcerer sought to snare him in a binding, and he sent the dark, thorny coils leaping back to net their maker.

  His foes spread out to flank him and no doubt get behind him if possible. He pivoted to strike at the ones on the right, and then, from the corner of his eye, glimpsed the Master of Change slashing his three hands through complex arcane patterns.

  A thing resembling a huge black sea anemone, its shadowy substance made of dozens of fused, flattened, anguished faces like the countenances of the damned, wavered into being in the air above the altar. Several of its wire-thin tentacles whipped at Dieter. He tried to dodge, but they caught him anyway, stabbing pain around the edges of his face and lodging there as if they terminated in barbs or fishhooks. They jerked him up on tiptoe as though attempting to tear his own face away from the skull beneath for incorporation into the central mass.

  He gritted out a counter spell, but it failed to wipe the hovering entity from existence. Heat seared his ribs; one of the sorcerers had managed to drive an attack through his protective halo.

  It’s over, Dieter realised. The warlocks will pick me apart while I dangle here struggling to free myself from the anemone. Krieger, you treacherous bastard, why didn’t you come?

  As though in answer to his silent reproach, gunfire banged, the reports echoing from the high stone walls. Someone screamed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  With his face angled upwards, immobilised, Dieter couldn’t see anything but the dark anemone, but he assumed all the cultists had jerked around to defend themselves from the intruders. If so, then for a moment at least, they’d stop attacking him. Maybe he still had a chance after all.

  Or maybe not. He threw darts of light at the flower-thing, but they didn’t appear to damage it. He asked the wind to tear it apart, but the conjured entity withstood the blast. Meanwhile, the pain around the periphery of his face was excruciating. It made it all but impossible to cast spells with the necessary precision, and it seemed to him that the pull was growing stronger.

  He croaked the call for a dark binding, nearly botching the cadence of the incantation
but correcting just in time. The coils pounced at the anemone, and he sent them snaking and weaving among the petals, entangling the entire structure, then, with a sudden, savage exertion of will, yanked the complex knot tight as a hangman’s noose arresting a condemned man’s drop through the gallows floor.

  The binding cut the manifestation to pieces. The myriad pieces screamed, and the petals started tumbling to the floor, only to vanish in mid-fall. The tentacles withered from existence as well, and the pain in Dieter’s face, or anyway, the worst of it, disappeared also. Blood from the punctures along his hairline trickled down his forehead, threatening to drip into his eyes and blind him. He wiped it away and looked around.

  As he’d surmised, Krieger and his minions had finally invaded the crypt, along with a flying fiery serpent like the one Dieter had encountered on the night he first met Adolph and Mama Solveig. The newcomers’ pistols had done their work, smearing the air with sulphurous smoke in the process, and now the human intruders had switched them out for swords. The snake dived and struck.

  Since Krieger had attacked by surprise, with the advantage of firearms, superior numbers and an infernal ally, he should have had no trouble massacring the leaders of the Red Crown. But in point of fact, it was unclear which side, if either, currently held the upper hand, because only a couple of the cultists had fallen. Perhaps the others wore protective talismans or possessed hidden alterations to their anatomy that had enabled them to withstand a volley of gunfire. In any event, they were striking back, with flares of dark power when possible, and fists and daggers when necessary.

  Too much of the time, it wasn’t necessary. Living up to his reputation for lethal skill and prodigious power, rattling off incantations, the Master of Change was conjuring supernatural servitors of his own to interpose themselves between the Red Crown and their foes. Dieter suspected that, like the spider-things Mama Solveig had evoked to test his abilities, the Master’s creatures weren’t real in every sense of the word. But they were tangible enough for one, a scuttling, crab-like thing the size of a table, to catch a witch hunter’s leg in its serrated pincers and snip it out from underneath him. The man fell, and the crab cut and pulled the rest of his body apart.

  Left undisturbed to produce such horrors in abundance, the Master would surely vanquish those who’d come to lay him low. Fortunately, Dieter, still standing between the towering black icon and the altar, was likewise well behind the defensive line of monstrosities, in good position to strike at the three-armed adept. In fact, the Master wasn’t even looking in his direction and likely had no idea he’d freed himself from the power of the floating anemone.

  Smiling, Dieter breathed the first syllable of a word of power, and something emitted an ear-splitting wail. When the Master heaved around in his direction, Dieter realised the source of the noise must have been the slavering infantile head growing from the warlock’s chest, because the dripping yellow eyes of the twisted lump were glaring at him. It had somehow sensed his hostile intentions and shrieked a warning.

  The Master snarled a rasp of a word Dieter had never heard before, and one of the conjured monstrosities forsook the defensive line to rush at him. Perhaps the ugly word was its name. The creature’s round, writhing form was so bizarre and complex that at first glance, it baffled the eye. Dieter couldn’t make out what it was, or whether it was crawling as fast as a man could sprint or rolling itself like a wheel.

  Then his mind made sense of it, and he perceived it was a great tangled mass of arms and clutching hands. Perhaps the limbs all grew from a central hub, or maybe they simply attached to one another. Dieter couldn’t see deeply enough into the shadowy crevices in the heaving, squirming mound to determine which.

  He cast darts of light at it, but the barrage failed to slow it down. It leaped onto the dais and then, like a ball bouncing, flung itself on top of the altar. A dozen hands snatched at him, and he hurled himself backwards. The creature pounced after him. He scrambled to get behind Tzeentch’s statue and use it for cover, but the entity lunged and cut him off.

  Dieter kept retreating before it, off the edge of the platform and onwards, relying on the precognitive vision of his third eye to warn him which hands would grab and pummel next. He hurled knives of shadow, but they had no more effect than the darts of light. He wrapped the monstrosity in a binding, but, scarcely pausing in its rolling, slapping, scuttling advance, it gripped the jagged strands and ripped them apart.

  Dieter felt himself starting to panic. He was already winded, and his glimpses of the future wouldn’t keep him out of the creature’s clutches once his reflexes slowed. He had to stop it forthwith, but how, when none of his spells appeared to have any effect at all?

  He shouted at it with a voice like thunder, but that was no use either. It grabbed his ankle and jerked him off his feet. He slammed down hard on his back, and the entity crawled over him, countless hands gripping and pounding him. He realised that if not for his protective halo, they likely would have rendered him helpless in an instant.

  The enchantment couldn’t save him for long. If he was lucky, he might have time to attempt one final piece of magic. Twisting his head back and forth to keep any of the monstrosity’s hands from covering his mouth, he gasped words of power, then scrabbled at the floor, his fingertips catching and bunching something cold and flat.

  With his arms essentially immobilised, he couldn’t actually rip the creature’s shadow away from its corporeal form. But the mere effort satisfied the requirements of the spell, and the entity, no doubt suffering the shock and sudden weakness he remembered, faltered in its efforts to mangle and kill its prey. Meanwhile, a second such mass, made of darkness and accordingly vague in the ambient gloom, surged up from the floor.

  The shadow creature threw itself on its counterpart, and the original let go of Dieter to defend itself against the assault. Tangled together, they rolled off him, and he jumped up and scrambled to distance himself from their portion of the battle.

  Gasping and shaking, he cast about. Though more combatants had fallen on both sides, the fight still raged. Krieger had left off swinging his gory sword to bellow an incantation. His effort shredded the flesh of two of the Red Crown’s conjured monstrosities. The serpent of flame hurtled down at the Master of Change, and he met it with a gesture of denial that stopped it as if it had slammed into an invisible wall. The relentless, ubiquitous discharge of unnatural energies brought chips of stone showering down from the ceiling and woke the graven images on the walls to jerky, repetitive life. Blades of gleaming copper-coloured grass stabbed up from the floor.

  Bracing himself for his next effort, Dieter drew a deep breath. Then something smashed into the back of his head.

  Jarla crouched in a small shrine, an alcove adjacent to the vault where everyone was fighting. A voice had started whispering from the shadows at the back of the space, and the statue in the centre, a representation of a robed dwarf carrying an orb and sceptre, cracked and crunched periodically. Maybe it was just getting ready to fall apart, but it reminded Jarla of an egg in the process of hatching.

  She was afraid to stay where she was, but even more reluctant to venture back out into the open and the maelstrom of slaughter there. She wished that she’d tried to flee the temple when hostilities first erupted, but her instinct had been to bolt for cover instead, and now it was too late. With a band of dark-clad, well-armed intruders and a vile miscellany of Chaos creatures swelling the numbers of the combatants, she had little hope of slipping past them all.

  So the only thing she could do was cower and watch, and more than anyone or anything else, she watched Dieter. She felt a reflexive stab of anguish when the thing with a hundred hands bore him down, and went limp with relief when he extricated himself from its clutches. The relief was short-lived. Mere moments later, a dark, hairless, shriveled-looking figure with a whipping rat-like tail appeared directly behind him. Perhaps it had just come into existence, or maybe it used a trick of invisibility to creep up on those it wis
hed to harm.

  It cocked back a bony fist and punched the back of Dieter’s head. Despite its emaciated appearance, it must be strong, because the blow threw him down on his belly. It immediately dropped to its knees on his back and gripped his neck in a stranglehold, lifting his head in the process. It opened a mouth lined with jagged tusks, and a white tongue as long as Jarla’s arm slithered forth to lick the bloody wounds on Dieter’s face.

  Jarla tensed, her body preparing to flinch, for she was sure Dieter was about to die. He was plainly helpless, and the creature need only savage him with those terrible fangs or wrench and break his neck with its powerful, long-fingered hands to finish him off. But it didn’t do either of those things. Not yet. Rather, it kept on throttling him while lapping at the flow of blood.

  Such being the case, Jarla realised she might be able to save him.

  But why should she risk herself? Why forsake her refuge, dubious though it was, dash out into the thick of the battle, and confront a Chaos creature? She comprehended almost nothing of what was happening, but she had heard Dieter say he was a spy. Surely that meant he’d deceived and used her from the start, and probably even expected her to die as a result of his machinations. He’d certainly thrown her down in the street and kicked her into submission, then dragged her into this nightmare against her will.

  Yet in the end, he’d endangered himself to save her, and of all the people she’d ever loved, he was the only one left. If she lost him too, was there even a point in trying to preserve what passed for her wretched little life?

  I’m an idiot, she thought, stupid as Adolph always said. She drew herself to her feet and, trying to stride quickly but quietly too, advanced on the blood-drinker and its prey.

  A stray flare of sorcerous fire blazed at her, and she jumped out of the way. His leather armour hanging in tatters, a lanky swordsman retreated across her path pursued by a thing like a homed lizard stalking on two legs. He executed stop cuts, and it slashed at him with talons as long as fingers. Each was too intent on the other to notice Jarla. She waited for them to pass, then scurried on.