03 - Death's Legacy

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “You always have a choice,” Hanna said earnestly. “You’ll find a way. Trust me.”

  “I… I suppose…” Rudi said, overwhelmed with the reality of her presence. The scent of her hair was in his nostrils, and despite himself he couldn’t prevent his arms from rising to encircle her. To his delirious surprise, instead of pulling away, Hanna returned the embrace. Then, after a moment, she began to pull away, with palpable reluctance. “I can’t stay any longer, Rudi, it isn’t safe for me here. I have to go now.”

  “Wait!” One nagging question rose to the surface of his befuddled mind. “How did you know I’d be here tonight?”

  “The Changer maps everyone’s path,” Hanna said, with a trace of amusement. “Yours isn’t so hard to follow.” She leaned in again, and kissed him lightly on the lips. Astonished, Rudi began to return the kiss, hungrily, but she pulled away. “Our paths will cross again, you can be sure of that.”

  His mind whirling, Rudi watched her slip away through the thinning congregation without a backward glance, lost within moments in the vast echoing space. Taking a deep breath he moved away from the shadowy niche, and made the sign of the hammer in front of the main altar. He’d hoped for a miracle without actually expecting one, and that seemed to be precisely what he’d been given.

  Turning away from the sanctuary, he found himself looking into the relieved eyes of his guardians. Both looked a little breathless, but he affected not to have noticed their brief absence at all.

  “Thank you for your patience,” he said, mildly surprised at how steady his voice sounded. “I feel a little better now.” Although he doubted that he’d get much sleep tonight, after his unexpected encounter with Hanna. His visions of the girl were stronger and more vivid than ever.

  “Are you all right?” Gerhard asked the next evening, gazing at him quizzically. Rudi nodded. His sleepless night had been succeeded by a restless day in which he’d eaten sparingly and had finally grabbed a fitful nap in the middle of the afternoon.

  “Apart from a daemon parasite sucking on my soul, you mean?” he asked sarcastically. Gerhard nodded.

  “I take your point,” he said mildly, “but these things take time. You know we’re doing all we can to find a way of removing it.”

  “That’s just it,” Rudi said, pacing the room. “You’re doing it, you and Osric. I’m just sitting here, day after day, waiting for something to happen, and it’s driving me crazy!” His voice was rising, he realised. Now that he was giving vent to the frustration that had been boiling away inside him for so long, the relief seemed almost exquisite. “I’m tired of carrying this abomination around in my head, I’m tired of being jerked about by Chaos-worshipping lunatics, and I’m tired of sitting on my hands waiting for someone else to sort it all out for me. I want to do something about it myself!”

  “That’s highly commendable,” Gerhard said levelly, “but while you remain here, you’re as safe as we can make you. We can’t take the risk of letting you run around the streets, where the agents of Chaos would have an opportunity of striking at you again.”

  “I know that,” Rudi said. “I’m not asking you to let me go out looking for cultists. That’s your job. I’d just like to do something to help speed things up, that’s all. You said it yourself, the sooner we get rid of this thing inside me, the better.”

  “That’s true.” The witch hunter nodded judiciously. “Did you have anything specific in mind?”

  “I could help in the library,” Rudi said. “I can read, at any rate, and I could hardly be safer anywhere else than in there. You heard Osric say that he would have found out about the ritual earlier if he’d had more time to spend checking the records.”

  “That’s true.” Gerhard nodded thoughtfully. “But I’m afraid most of the books he’s consulting aren’t that easily read.”

  “I noticed,” Rudi said dryly. “But some of them are in Reikspiel, aren’t they? I could look through those, at least.”

  “I suppose you could.” Gerhard looked at him levelly. “But it’s highly unlikely that you’d find anything pertinent in any of those documents. Most grimoires are in arcane languages at best, and a few of the most likely sources are in no human tongue.”

  “It’s worth a try, though, isn’t it?” Rudi asked. He looked challengingly at the witch hunter. “I bet you don’t even know for sure what you’ve got locked away down there.”

  “That’s true,” Gerhard conceded. “Most of the books we’ve acquired over the centuries are there to be contained, rather than consulted. There are those who argue that they’d be better off burned and forgotten, but destroying the page doesn’t destroy the knowledge written on it, and if others use such blasphemies against us, we can fight them more effectively if we know precisely what we’re up against.”

  “Exactly,” Rudi said, “and even if there isn’t much chance of me finding anything useful, at least I’d feel better for doing something.”

  “Fair enough.” Gerhard nodded thoughtfully. “The talisman should prevent the daemon from taking advantage of anything you come across. I’ll get Osric to make the arrangements.”

  The following day, Rudi began his researches in the library, or to be more precise, in the outlying annexe that the witch hunters used for their clandestine meetings. Gerhard conducted him there shortly after dawn, and left him there under the watchful eyes of von Karien, his ever-present templar shadows left waiting outside the door. His kinsman expressed no surprise at his newly discovered enthusiasm for ferreting through the stacks of arcane tomes, merely glancing up from the volume he was perusing at the battered wooden table in the centre of the room as Gerhard ushered Rudi inside. Rudi glanced at it in passing, but the text was in Classical, the long-dead language used only by scholars, and found outside libraries almost nowhere but in the ruins left by those who had passed from the Old World long before Sigmar had reshaped it in the forge of his indomitable will.

  “So, this was your own idea, was it?” von Karien asked, once his colleague had departed. Rudi nodded, taking the man’s meaning. In his position, Rudi supposed, he would be wondering if the newly kindled desire to search through books of arcane lore was entirely innocent, or the result of Chaotic contamination from the daemon he carried within him; perhaps even at the instigation of the daemon itself.

  “I think so,” he said, meeting the implied challenge to his motives head on. Von Karien nodded, curtly.

  “I hope so. What changed your mind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rudi told him, somehow sure that sullen vagueness would seem more convincing than an elaborately-prepared lie about his conversation with Hanna. “I just got sick and tired of waiting around for someone else to solve my problems for me, that’s all.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” von Karien said. “I haven’t exactly been thrilled about wet-nursing you, either.” He gestured to the bookshelves behind them. “I’ve had anything that seems even vaguely relevant brought in here, for my own researches.” Rudi turned his head to look in the direction the witch hunter had indicated. Several of the stacks had been cleared of the old books that he’d noticed the last time he’d been in the room, and replaced with bundles of paper and a handful of bound volumes. “Most of the material in plain Reikspiel is on the shelves in that corner. Interrogation transcripts, the grimoires we recovered from the witches and necromancers we came across looking for your friends, that kind of thing.” He shot an evaluating glance at Rudi. “I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, boy.”

  “Strong enough,” Rudi replied shortly. “I’ll start with the necromancers. They’re supposed to know something about life and death.”

  “They think they do,” von Karien said, with a trace of vindictive amusement, “but they burn just as easily in the end.”

  “Well they should know something about the soul too, shouldn’t they?” Rudi replied shortly.

  “I’ve never known one with anything worth the name left,” von Karien said, and returned to his own researches.
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br />   Despite his casual denial, Rudi found the material he began to read through that morning hard-going, the minds who’d produced it so clearly deranged that the insanity of its authors seemed to permeate the very pages it was written on. There was a palpable malevolence about much of it too, a positive glorying in death and destruction, which he found both distasteful and disturbing. Nevertheless, he persevered, reluctant to give in so easily and allow von Karien the satisfaction of having his opinion confirmed.

  His dreams that night were dark and unnerving, so much so that he woke suddenly, his heart hammering, and he almost resolved to remain in his room the next morning and leave von Karien to his researches. Then he remembered Hanna’s assertion that he wasn’t the kind of person to let others solve his problems for him, and the idea of betraying her confidence in him was even more painful than that of facing another day subjected to the ravings of madmen. The thought of her calmed him at last, and he fell asleep again, the image of her face strong in his mind.

  After that it became much easier to deal with the horrors he read, the thought of Hanna a potent antidote to the spiritual poison on the pages in front of him. On the third day he was astonished to discover what appeared to be the manuscript of a play, bundled up and sealed.

  “This is by Detlef Sierck,” he said, bemused, glancing at the name on the title page. “What’s it doing in here?”

  “Not being performed,” von Karien said. “And it never will be again. Once, I gather, was more than enough.” Shrugging, Rudi returned it to the shelf. Fascinating as the chance to read a suppressed work by the Empire’s greatest playwright would normally have been, it wouldn’t help him to gain any insights into the problem that faced him at the moment. Forcing a space between two of the bound volumes on the shelf he’d been working along to make room for the folio, he found it obstructed by something behind them. Von Karien glanced up, leaning back in his chair to peer around the shelf at him. “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s something jammed in behind here,” Rudi said. He pulled a couple of the larger volumes off the shelf and fished around behind them, eventually producing a small book. It was bound in plain leather, worn with age, and with what looked like water stains marring its surface. Its pages were wrinkled with damp, and smelled faintly of mildew. Evidently it had spent a good deal of time out of doors, or perhaps in a decaying building somewhere, becoming gradually exposed to the elements as the structure around it crumbled away. He’d seen a couple like it already, although neither had been in quite such poor condition. “It’s just another diary by the look of it. It must have fallen down the back there when this lot was put on the shelves.”

  He returned to the table and opened it at random, half expecting the words to wriggle away from his eyes as they had done when he’d glanced at the Fulvium Paginarum. They didn’t. Instead, they remained fixed on the page, faint, crabbed handwriting, the words blurred a little where the ink had seeped into the dampened paper, but still perfectly legible.

  …this day did I again encounter the beastmen, escaping barely by means of concealment within a tree of alder, due to the clamour of their coming. Of the yrbes I obtained I anticipate much, and hope not to venture within the wood again for considerable time…

  The Reikspiel was somewhat archaic, but still easy to understand. Rudi stared at the page, wondering who had written it, and why.

  That question at least was easily answered. He flicked back through the leaves until he found the first.

  Being a chronicle of my researches into the mystical realm, begun this day the third of Sigmarzeit in the 1832nd year of the Empire, set down for the guidance of others, by Theodoric of Ostermark.

  Rudi felt the hairs on the back of his neck begin to prickle. This document predated the founding of the Colleges of Magic by almost five hundred years, and the destruction of the fabled lost city, which had once been the capital of its author’s home province, by more than a century and a half. Perhaps this Theodoric, whoever he had been, really had stumbled across a crucial piece of knowledge lost to future generations.

  The more he read, the more he began to realise that this was nothing like the deluded and blasphemous ravings he’d been plodding through so wearily before. Though most of Theodoric’s notes concerned matters that Rudi knew nothing about, the man seemed to have been rational and cautious, building methodically on his earlier discoveries, and putting such arcane lore as he was able to glean from other sources to the test wherever possible. In the cases where it wasn’t, because to do so seemed too dangerous or the collaboration of other spell casters was required, the sage of Ostermark had merely recorded what he’d heard or read, with such observations as had evidently seemed pertinent at the time, and moved on to more readily verifiable researches.

  It was one such passage, about halfway through the book, which arrested his attention. By this time, Rudi had been reading for several hours, and his eyes were blurring with fatigue.

  …it is said that the True Essences may be conjoined by means of such a ritual, as was once used by the shamans of the Old Way to commune with the spirits of beasts, although great care must be exercised lest the souls thus conjoined be intermingled too greatly for their subsequent dissolution…

  For a moment, the words hung before him, their meaning obscured by the fog of exhaustion that had descended inexorably upon him as the day wore on, but as they penetrated his fatigue-dulled synapses a flood of familiar panic shook his body. Trembling so violently that he almost dropped the book, he took a deep breath and fought for calm. Whatever these notes might mean, the daemon inside him was clearly terrified of their implications. Rudi gave a feral smile.

  “Got you,” he told the thing, savouring the prospect of imminent victory. He took a deep breath, stilling the hammering of his heart, and looked up at the witch hunter sitting opposite. “Osric. I think this may be it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “You’re sure this is genuine?” Gerhard asked. Von Karien nodded, the flickering of firelight in the grate of Rudi’s chamber in the Templars’ Court deepening the shadows around his face, and imparting an uncharacteristic glow to his normally pale features.

  “It certainly appears to be. It’s old without a doubt, and the text is a close match for the known fragments.”

  “The known fragments of what?” Rudi asked, and Gerhard glanced in his direction.

  “Theodoric’s manuscript. It’s been copied many times over the centuries, no doubt being pared down to just the passages that the transcriber understood in the process, until little remained in circulation but a handful of spells, passed from witch to witch.” Von Karien nodded again.

  “That’s all I’d assumed it was, when we recovered it from one of the Silver Wheel covens we raided last month. I never thought to look at it more closely. If Rudi hadn’t found it when he did, we might never have realised it was the original.”

  “Or at least a full copy,” Gerhard said. He frowned, looking troubled. “This ritual seems like a promising place to start, but it also confirms what we most feared. Greta Reifenstahl, or her associates, are definitely planning something.”

  “Then we need to act quickly,” von Karien urged. “Having the book in our hands should spike their guns nicely, at any rate.”

  “Unless they’ve already copied the parts they need,” Gerhard pointed out.

  “All the more reason to get on with things,” Rudi said, remembering Hanna’s whispered words in the temple. The others were only speculating, but he knew for certain that Greta was planning something dangerous. Or had Hanna really meant to warn him about the witch hunters? Perhaps he should stall for time, and attempt to delay their attempt until the sorceress had been able to carry out her plan after all… His head hummed with confusion, made all the worse by his ever-present headache.

  “I agree,” Gerhard said, taking matters out of his hands once again. “Whether or not the Silver Wheel intended to use this ritual to liberate the daemon, we can use the same
method to destroy it.” A thin smile appeared on his face, matching von Karien’s. “I have to admit, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from turning our enemies’ own weapons against them.”

  After that, events seemed to move with bewildering rapidity. Clerics of increasing seniority came and went, poring over the battered book, and scribbling copious notes of their own, while the witch hunters held hushed and urgent meetings from which Rudi was pointedly excluded. Once again, he was gripped by the sensation of being thrust to the periphery of events, but this time the sense of frustration he’d felt before was absent. Hanna had promised that they’d meet again, and although he’d failed to catch sight of her on any of his subsequent visits to the temple, he continued to find the thought of her hovering presence reassuring.

  So it was with a surprising degree of calm that he listened to Gerhard a couple of evenings later, while the man in black outlined the plan they were to follow.

  “I can’t deny that it’s going to be tricky,” the witch hunter said, sipping a mug of mulled wine as he watched the snowflakes flicker past Rudi’s window.

  Winter had gripped the Imperial capital in earnest, and the temple precincts were becoming overrun with the desperate destitute, hoping to find some measure of warmth and comfort in the home of the Empire’s patron god. The temple itself was more crowded than ever, the queues for alms only kept sullenly restive by the conspicuous presence of heavily armed templars, and on a couple of his forays to pray there Rudi had stumbled over beggars who had somehow managed to make their way out of the public areas and into the warren of byways connecting the peripheral buildings. What had happened to them, he had no idea. They were removed by the guards, he supposed, or had possibly frozen to death trying to find the way out again.

  “I hardly expected it to be easy,” Rudi countered, “otherwise we’d have done it by now.” And he would have been off in search of Hanna.