“It’s possible,” Gerhard said. “Greta Reifenstahl was living in the same village for years, undoubtedly keeping an eye on Magnus von Blackenburg and his cult. Now she’s here in Altdorf, and reunited with her daughter, just when we’ve caught up with Rudi. That’s a pretty big coincidence, and we know only too well that there’s no such thing as coincidence where the Lord of Change is concerned.”
“Then we’d better finish this quickly,” von Karien said.
“Finish what?” Rudi asked impatiently.
“I’m afraid it’s rather a long story,” Gerhard said, “and much of it is inference and deduction, but it all goes back to the night we raided the von Karien estate, and found your father’s cult enacting a hideous ritual.”
“I know about that,” Rudi said. “Osric told me.”
“I told you some of it,” von Karien said. “What I didn’t mention before was that you were there. You were a part of it.”
“What do you mean, I was a part of it?” Rudi asked, apprehension and horror sweeping over him with renewed vigour. His months as a watchman had made him adept at detecting evasions and falsehoods, and both men spoke in the level tones of someone telling the absolute truth. All the thoughts he’d had of fighting his way free were gone. The only thing he wanted was to know the full story of his past, although his hands trembled with unease at the prospect. “How could I have been?” An appalling possibility presented itself, as he recalled von Karien’s words the previous night. “You mean they were going to sacrifice me? My own parents?” His stomach twisted at the enormity of it, but to his vague relief von Karien’s plaster-thick porridge seemed determined to remain where it was.
“Worse than that,” von Karien said heavily. Gerhard nodded.
“It took some time to deduce the nature of the ritual. It was one we’d never seen before, and the battle left few traces of what had been going on, but in the months that followed, as we combed through the papers your father had left, and interrogated the peripheral members of the cult we’d been able to track down, we began to find clues as to what he had hoped to achieve.”
“Which was what?” Rudi asked, his mouth dry. Gerhard was silent for a moment, clearly wondering how best to explain.
“What do you know of the nature of daemons?” he asked at last. Completely taken aback by the question, Rudi shrugged.
“Nothing at all,” he said. He looked from one witch hunter to another, and clearly this was the answer they’d been expecting. “Well, only what everybody knows,” he added, trying to be helpful. “They’re powerful and nasty, and you don’t want to meet one.”
“True enough,” Gerhard said, “but what most people don’t realise is that the most powerful tend to be servants of a particular one of the Dark Powers. Your parents were attempting to invoke a daemon prince of Nurgle, the Lord of Disease.”
“The same power that Magnus worshipped?” Rudi asked.
Gerhard nodded. “Him and his cult, both in Kohlstadt and Marienburg, although the one in the city seems to have had another leader, at least in his absence.”
“The lawyer, van Crackenmeer?” Rudi asked.
“He’s a plausible suspect. Why do you think that?” Gerhard asked.
“I found a letter from Magnus in his office,” Rudi explained, “talking about me, and Greta Reifenstahl, and somebody’s grandchildren. I’m not sure who the grandchildren were, though.”
“His fellow degenerates,” von Karien said, with manifest loathing. Rudi’s confusion must have shown on his face, because he paused to explain. “The Plague God’s acolytes refer to him as Grandfather Nurgle. Presumably in an attempt to deny the truth of what they’re worshipping by making it sound protective and benign.”
“I wanted to talk to van Crackenmeer to find out where Magnus was living,” Rudi explained, “but by the time I got to his office, he was already dead.”
“I realised you hadn’t killed him as soon as I saw the body. It was obviously the work of a mutant. If you’d discussed matters reasonably then, as I asked, instead of making a fight of it, I would have made that abundantly clear.”
“It was Hans Katzenjammer,” Rudi explained. There was no point in not being as honest as he could at this juncture, he thought. The witch hunters obviously knew more about what was going on than he did, and any information he was able to add to that would only enable them to explain things to him more clearly.
“Katzenjammer?” Gerhard looked surprised for the first time. “Are you sure?”
“I’m a tracker,” Rudi reminded him, “and I’d followed him through the woods, remember? The traces he left were pretty distinctive.” He hesitated, and then hurried on, reminding himself that there was no point in holding anything back. “Besides, I’d already seen him in Marienburg. He was there with Greta. They attacked Magnus and his cultists.” He frowned, still trying to understand the bizarre confrontation that he’d witnessed. “I still don’t know what to make of it, to be honest. I got lost in the Doodkanal shortly after we arrived in the city, and I found this old warehouse on the waterfront. Magnus and his followers were there, chanting about a boat, and then Greta and Hans arrived and killed them all, or, most of them, anyhow. Magnus got away, and a few of the others I think.”
“A boat?” Von Karien looked confused. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said Rudi. “They kept saying, ‘Hail the vessel’.” Another thought struck him. “That’s what they were chanting in the forest too, just before the beastmen attacked.”
“You were there as well?” Gerhard asked, his voice intent.
“I just stumbled into the clearing. I was looking for my father in the woods, and somehow I knew the right way to go. It was like that in the city too, when I found the warehouse. It just seemed right.”
“You were being summoned,” von Karien said. “At least…” he hesitated, and glanced at Gerhard. “The vessel was.”
“It can’t have been,” Rudi told him. “Kohlstad’s miles from the Reik. There’s nowhere a boat could dock anywhere near the place.” He glanced at Gerhard. “You’ve been there, you must remember.”
“The main characteristic of daemons,” Gerhard said, “and it’s a fortunate one indeed, is that they’re tied to the Realm of Chaos. Except for the most tainted of places, they can’t remain in the mortal world for long, unless they possess a mortal host.”
“I see.” Rudi nodded, a tight knot of terror winding itself around his gut. The implications were obvious, but he still couldn’t bring himself to face them. “So this daemon my parents were invoking would have vanished again soon anyway.”
“Ordinarily, yes,” Gerhard nodded soberly, “but it seems that your father had struck a bargain with a daemon prince. In exchange for power, and knowledge that only a madman would crave, he agreed to provide it with a host, a vessel.”
“His own son.” Von Karien’s voice was so thick with disgust that it was barely recognisable. “You.”
“That’s impossible!” Rudi protested, more by reflex than because he believed it to be true. So much that had perplexed him now made a twisted kind of sense. “If I was possessed, I’d know it, wouldn’t I?”
“Not necessarily,” Gerhard said. “It’s quite common for the victims of possession to be unaware of the presence inside themselves.” He gazed levelly at Rudi. “Have you ever woken somewhere with no memory of how you got there? Found periods of time missing from your recollection?”
“No.” Rudi shook his head, feeling the first faint stirrings of relief. “Nothing like that.” He remembered something else. “Besides, you interrupted the ritual, didn’t you? It was never completed.”
“Exactly.” Von Karien nodded soberly. “At the time, we thought that would be enough to thwart their fell design. It was only after we’d examined Manfred’s papers that another, more disturbing possibility presented itself.”
“Which was?” Rudi asked, already dreading the answer. Gerhard went on, his pale blue eyes boring into him like an auger.<
br />
“That enough of the daemon’s essence had already entered you for it to remain trapped there, in a dormant state. It’s my belief that the ritual in the woods was intended to revive it, and complete the process.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Rudi protested, uncomfortably sure that it wasn’t.
Gerhard shook his head soberly.
“It’s my belief that whoever removed you from the house sent you to Kohlstadt, perhaps by magical means, knowing that von Blackenburg would prepare the way to complete the pact. You said yourself that he’d had dealings with the von Karien family. Manfred must have been aware that he was a fellow cultist, at the very least.”
“Why would he wait so long?” Rudi asked, seizing on every objection he could think of to the chain of reasoning that Gerhard was laying out so patiently.
Von Karien shrugged. “Partly because he needed to make extensive preparations,” he said. “Incarnating and binding the daemon would require a great deal of power, and a full coven of worshippers.” Gerhard nodded his agreement.
“Not only that, some kinds of ritual magic are most potent at particular times. The Chaos moon was in exactly the same alignment that night as it had been when your parents first tried to summon the daemon. It wasn’t until I examined the site of the ritual, and searched von Blackenburg’s house, that I began to notice certain similarities with what I’d seen fifteen years before. I began to wonder if you might possibly be the missing vessel, and set out to find you. By then it was too late. You’d already fled.”
“Then if the beastmen hadn’t attacked…” Rudi’s voice trailed away, unwilling to complete the thought.
Gerhard nodded soberly. “The daemon would have taken control of your body, consuming your soul in the process. As it was, it seems to have remained dormant, at least for the most part.”
“So that’s why Magnus tried to kill me,” Rudi said. He felt numb, beyond all feeling. The magnitude of the concept was just too great to grasp. Gerhard nodded.
“He knew he’d lost. All he could do was free it, and allow it to wreak as much damage as possible.”
“So if I die,” Rudi said, looking from one witch hunter to the other, letting the idea sink in slowly, “the daemon escapes.”
“That’s right,” Gerhard said, “and sooner or later, you will. Everyone does, and that leaves us with a considerable problem.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Any news?” Rudi asked hopefully. Gerhard shook his head, and pulled up a chair next to the fireplace, where a small fire sputtered fitfully. The room was a large, but bare, with tiny vertical slots in the stone for windows. Its contents numbered two hard chairs, a bed, and a rickety writing table.
“No progress at all.” Their regular evening conversation concluded, both sat staring at the dying flames, as if a solution to their terrible dilemma might somehow be found within them. The form of words might have changed from night to night, but the import of them hadn’t, for the whole of the three weeks that Rudi had been staying in a secure room in the templar chapter house.
In all that time, he hadn’t left the temple precincts once. He’d hardly even been allowed to set foot outside the room, and the bustle and squalor of the city surrounding them had faded to a distant memory. The predominant odours were of incense, wafting on the breeze from the scores of small shrines scattered around the sprawling site, and cooking, exuding from the refectory. That, at least, was some compensation for being kept under arrest, he thought, the viands provided by the temple authorities were of the finest quality, even his uneducated palate able to discern subtleties of flavour that he’d never considered possible before. All in all, he was better off now than he’d had any right to expect, especially given the way things had been at first.
When they’d left the library annexe, he’d tried to make a run for it, but still weak from the near-fatal stab wound and the after-effects of Gerhard’s healing prayer, he’d stumbled within a handful of paces, and been mercilessly battered to the ground by the two witch hunters. By the time they’d finished with him, he’d been barely able to stand, let alone walk, and had acquired a grim understanding of what von Karien had meant by his assertion that needing him alive didn’t have to mean whole.
Certain that he was in no fit state to resist any further, the two men had hoisted him up between them and dragged him away to a small, windowless room somewhere in the cellars of the chapter house.
How long he’d remained there, he had no idea. Day and night ceased to have any meaning, and the only relief from the stygian darkness surrounding him was the faint glow of torchlight from the corridor beyond as it leaked around the jamb of the ill-fitting door, accompanied by a draught that chilled him to the bone. What sleep he could get was fitful at best, interrupted periodically by the clatter of boots in the corridor outside, and intermittent bursts of agonised screaming, so muffled by the intervening walls that he couldn’t tell whether they came from a man or a woman.
As if that hadn’t been torment enough, his head ached constantly from the talisman that Gerhard had fused to his forehead, just as he’d done with Hanna the first time the fugitives had fallen into his hands, in order to keep the daemon within him bound even more tightly than it already was. He’d soon given up trying to touch the thing, every attempt resulting in a blinding stab of pure agony, and if it was possible, he found himself hating the witch hunter even more than he had done before. Not so much on his own behalf, but because of his renewed appreciation of how much Hanna had suffered during their months in Marienburg, while a similar abomination had been suppressing her magical abilities.
Somehow, the anger had given him the strength to endure his captivity, and the growing hunger pangs, which, by the time the door finally creaked open again, had grown even more painful than the ache in his head. Forewarned by the rattle of the key in the lock he’d clawed himself upright against the moisture-slick stone, determined not to show his captors the slightest sign of weakness.
“It’s about time,” he’d snapped, blinking dazzled eyes at the silhouette filling the doorframe: Gerhard, of course. Of von Karien there’d been no sign, other than the distant screaming, some luckless member of the Silver Wheel, he assumed, or some even more luckless innocent mistaken for one. With an effort of will he ignored the sound, trying to sound confident. “Get me some food, unless you want me to starve to death and let the daemon out.”
“That won’t happen,” Gerhard said flatly. “We’ll keep you alive, you can be sure of that, and sooner or later you’ll tell us where the witches are hiding.”
“Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Rudi said, not even trying to hide the sudden surge of joy he felt at the witch hunter’s words. Hanna was still safe. With any luck, she and Greta had both left Altdorf days ago, and were now far beyond the templars’ ability to find them. “I wouldn’t be so sure you can keep me alive, either.”
“Never make a threat you’re not prepared to carry out,” Gerhard said, understanding his meaning at once. A thread of contempt entered his voice. “You’re not the kind to take your own life.”
“Are you sure?” Rudi locked his eyes on the witch hunter’s, summoning up every iota of loathing and hatred that he could. “What have I got left to lose? The joy of being buried alive down here, being threatened with torture? I’d rather die now, and leave you to deal with the daemon. If you really think you can.”
“In the precincts of the temple of Sigmar? The holiest site in the Empire?” Gerhard laughed curtly. “Of course we could.”
“Then why haven’t you?” Rudi challenged him. “Just cut my throat, let it out, and exorcise the damn thing.” He took a tottering step towards the witch hunter, who was still standing barring the door. “But you won’t, will you? You’re afraid you won’t be able to handle it once it takes possession of my body.” He was standing nose to nose with the man in black, practically spitting in his face with the vehemence of his words. “Come on, I’ll make it easy for you.”
The knife in his boot had gone, confiscated after a brief search, along with the one from his belt, but that didn’t matter. Gerhard kept a dagger concealed up his sleeve, and with one convulsive motion he snatched at the witch hunter’s shirt, ripping the fabric. The blade flew reflexively into the witch hunter’s hand, and he took a step back into the corridor outside, instinctively making room to use the weapon effectively. Rudi followed, pushing his chest against the point of the blade.
“Go on,” he challenged. “Let it out. I dare you.” For a moment he feared he might have overplayed his hand, but Gerhard hesitated, and he knew he’d won his gamble. Turning abruptly, he shouldered past the man in black, and took a step towards the door leading to the yard outside. Then he turned, and glanced back. “I want a meal, a wash, and a bed, in that order. Then we can talk.”
Rather to his surprise, his ultimatum had proven more successful than he’d expected. The quarters provided for him were a slight improvement on the dungeon he’d so briefly occupied, but despite their relative comfort he was still a prisoner, and the sense of enclosure the four walls created in him was stultifying. There was nothing to do, no one to speak to, and his body cried out for exercise. Most of his days were filled with reading, or practising the sword drills that Theo had shown him so long ago, with the aid of a pewter candlestick to simulate the weight of a weapon.
His only visitor was Gerhard, occasionally accompanied by von Karien. Monotonous as these conversations were, concerned solely with the progress that the witch hunters were failing to make in finding a way to rid him of the daemon, or trying to get him to reveal whatever he could remember that might help to find Hanna and Greta, he almost looked forward to them. Despite the veneer of politeness that both he and Gerhard tried hard to maintain, the simmering hostility between them was never far from the surface.
“Have you eaten yet?” Gerhard asked after a while, having failed yet again to trick Rudi into disclosing what he didn’t know. Rudi shook his head.
[Blood on the Reik 03] - Death's Legacy Page 22