CHAPTER FIVE

 

 

Dieter stumbled through a desert, with masses of granite protruding from the earth and a range of mountains rising in the distance, and moment by moment, everything changed.

Many of the alterations were small but disturbing nonetheless. A dune flattened slightly, a pattern in the sand oozed into a different configuration, or the striations in a pillar of stone darkened. There was nowhere he could rest his gaze to escape the constant, nauseating crawling.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Periodically, change happened on a grander scale. At the edge of the desert, the snow capping three of the peaks exploded into clouds of steam. Then, closer to hand, one of the standing stones melted into a feline-headed giant sunk waist-deep in the earth. The titan glared, hissed and snatched for Dieter, but he scrambled back beyond its reach. The creature struggled to drag itself out of the ground, and he fled. Sometime after that, redness ran like streaming blood through the brown terrain. Blades of coarse crimson grass jabbed upwards from what had been sand. The columns of rock became vermilion trees, their branches bedizened with yellow blossoms that smelled like sulphur and trilled to one another.

The universe had gone mad, and was stabbing its madness into Dieter’s eyes. Unable to bear it, he lifted his face to the sky, the realm he comprehended and perhaps even loved better than anything on earth. There, change occurred in a stately cyclical dance, according to laws he understood, which meant that in a certain sense, nothing ever changed at all. The heavens would be his refuge.

That was how he needed it to be. But when he looked up, he found the same inconstancy that prevailed below. He couldn’t even tell if it was day or night, or if that distinction still possessed any meaning. At first, part of the sky was bright without any sun to shed the light, while the rest was dark and dotted with green luminescences—Dieter couldn’t bring himself to think of them as stars—that both churned like eddies and flitted about like flies. Then the whole sky turned mauve, with a white glowing square in the centre. After a time the rectangle crumpled in on itself as if a gigantic invisible hand were crushing it. At the instant it vanished entirely, a robed, hooded colossus appeared where it had been. The immense apparition sat on a golden throne, and legions of daemons, tiny as toy soldiers by comparison, grovelled before it.

Dieter cried out and tore his gaze away, and at that point noticed his shadow. It was changing like everything else, and not just because the light kept shifting.

Shaking, he raised his hands before his eyes. They were pale, then olive-skinned, then mottled with sores. They had four fingers each, and then the left sprouted an extra pair of thumbs. Inconstancy had squirmed its way inside him.

He felt a sudden savage urge to gouge his eyes out so he wouldn’t have to see such things anymore. But a mild baritone voice said, “Please, don’t be foolish.”

Startled, Dieter jerked around, then screamed and flinched. The speaker wore a simple robe belted with rope, as well as a cowl that shadowed his features. He looked like many a common priest, but also like the transcendent figure the wizard had glimpsed enthroned in the sky.

The newcomer must have realised the source of Dieter’s terror, for he pulled back his cowl to reveal a wry, intelligent, human face. “It’s all right! I’m not him. I only want to help you.”

Dieter swallowed. The action felt strange, as if the musculature at the top of his throat had altered. “Help me how?”

“By pointing you over there.” The priest extended his arm. Dieter followed the gesture and beheld a pool of water amid the writhing scarlet grass.

The pool’s surface was still, nor did its silver-grey hue alter even subtly from one second to the next. It was the one steady point in the storm of change, and perhaps that meant it could offer sanctuary.

Dieter dashed to the pool and waded into the cool water. He wondered if he should immerse himself completely.

“That isn’t necessary,” said the priest. He must have run, too, to catch up so quickly. “Just look at the water and nothing else.”

Dieter did as he’d been told, and at first, it helped. The pool didn’t change. It didn’t even reflect the fluctuations in the sky, or his own face, for that matter, and his fear and queasiness eased a little.

Then, beneath the surface, streaks and blobs of soft colour shimmered into being. He cried out in dismay.

“It’s all right,” said the priest. “This is something different. Just keep looking.”

“Very well.” Why not? Even if the pool altered in some ghastly fashion, how could it be more horrific than the transformations occurring everywhere else?

The colours in the water took on definition until they formed a recognisable image. A man and a woman, both tall, slender and blond, lay on their sides in a canopy bed. The man was facing his companion, but she had her back to him. Though the room was dark, enough light leaked through the curtains to reveal the butterflies and roses in the tapestry on the wall.

Dieter caught his breath in surprise. He was looking at his parents as they’d appeared long before their deaths, when he himself was a child.

“I know you can never forgive me,” his mother said.

“I can and do,” his father replied.

“How?” she spat. “I betrayed you! I gave birth to an abomination and passed it off as your son!”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “It was ten years ago, and back then, I was unfaithful, too. So the way I see it, Dieter isn’t just the punishment for your sins but for mine as well. The important thing is, the Celestial College will take him. We don’t have to live under the same roof with him or even see him again.”

“This never happened,” Dieter said.

“Were you privy to what they whispered to one another in bed?” asked the priest.

“It can’t have happened! They didn’t fear or despise magic. They sent me to Altdorf because I wanted and needed to go.”

“Just watch,” said the priest.

The scene in the water dissolved into drifting colours, which then flowed together and sharpened to present a new picture. The adolescent Dieter, clad in the blue-trimmed garb of an apprentice of his order, rapped on a familiar door.

“Come in,” Franz Lukas answered.

Dieter entered his mentor’s study, cluttered with books, taxonomic charts of birds and clouds, anemometers, astrolabes and other implements of Celestial wizardry. With his brilliant blue eyes shining beneath scraggly white brows, the elderly but still robust and energetic magician was no less emblematic of his particular art.

“Shut it behind you,” Magister Lukas said.

The young Dieter obeyed. “You sent for me, sir?”

“Yes,” the teacher said. “You’ve come a long way in your studies. You’re the most promising apprentice I’ve seen in a while.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So I think you deserve a reward.” Magister Lukas opened a desk drawer and produced a small book. “Make sure no one else sees it.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the youth took the book and opened the cover. “The Principles of Alchemy.” He clapped the volume shut. “Master, this is the Lore of Metal!”

“So it is.”

“Are you testing me?”

“Perhaps, but not in the way you suppose. I know your teachers, myself included, have drummed it into you that you must restrict yourself to the Lore of the Heavens. Any human wizard who seeks to invoke more than one of the eight winds of magic likewise opens himself to the Chaos from which they derive, and must inevitably come to ruin.”

“Yes, sir.”

Magister Lukas snorted. “No. It’s nonsense. The false rationale for a stricture imposed on us to keep us from realising our potential and ordering all things to please ourselves. The best of us, the wisest and boldest, refuse to wear such a shackle. We acquire knowledge and power wherever we can find them. I believe you’re one of the best, or at least you could be. Am I right?”

The young Dieter hesitated, then tucked the book inside his shirt.

“No!” his older counterpart exploded. “I know this couldn’t have happened! I was there!”

“Yes,” said the priest, “you were.”

The scene at the bottom of the pool flowed and became a view of Dieter as a wandering journeyman mage for hire. Crouched behind a stand of brush at the top of a hill, he peered down at the little dirt road than ran along the bottom.

Singly or in groups, afoot or driving carts, laden with bundles or chivvying sheep and cows along, people tramped by below. The older Dieter—the real one, he insisted to himself—inferred they’d all been to market and now were heading home through the deepening twilight.

Eventually a stocky man astride a black mare appeared. The quality of his palfrey and his velvet doublet bespoke prosperity, as did the neatly clad servant or clerk riding a mule behind him.

Dieter the journeyman rose, whispered words of power, and thrust his arm out. Darts of azure light leaped from his fingertips to pierce the horseman, who toppled sideways out of the saddle.

The mare kept walking. The servant reined in his mule and gaped at his fallen master. Apparently he had neither noticed the darts flying nor spotted the assailant on the hill, and thus had no idea how his companion had come to grief. He was still staring when a second such attack stabbed into his torso. He slumped forwards onto the mule’s neck.

Dieter looked up and down the road, then ran to the base of the hill. He crouched over the body of the horseman, snatched his victim’s purse and rings, and moved on to the clerk. He crooned to the mule to keep it from shying away.

“No!” the actual Dieter cried. “None of this is true.”

“It wasn’t before,” said the priest, his voice now cold and pitiless, “but it is now. Did you really think a puddle could shield you from Chaos? Chaos is all-powerful. It can transform anything, even the past. Do you perceive your memories changing?”

Dieter felt a churning inside his head.

“Your past made you who you are,” the priest continued, “so, since Chaos can alter that, it can transform you into whatever it wants. As it has. Go and take your place among your comrades.” He waved his arm.

Dieter turned and saw that somehow the monstrous army he’d seen in the sky had appeared at the edge of the pool. One of the nearest daemons had the body of a huge scorpion and the gurgling, cooing head of an infant. Its drool shrivelled the grass. The entity next to it resembled a seven-legged mastiff pieced together from irregular bits of brass and lead. No two of the creatures were alike, and many, manifesting the same entropy infecting the landscape, oozed and flickered from one shape to another.

“No!” Dieter said. “I’m not one of them.”

“Of course you are.” The priest scooped up a handful of water and let it go. It fell partway, then froze, hanging in the air in a bright streak that finally reflected Dieter’s face with the clarity of a fine glass mirror.

He screamed.

 

The daemons grabbed Dieter by the wrists, to drag him into their ranks by force or tear him apart for his recalcitrance. He thrashed, trying to break free even though he knew it was impossible for one to prevail against so many.

Then suddenly, it wasn’t daemons holding onto him anymore, and he wasn’t standing in the pool. A woman peered anxiously down at him. Disoriented as he was, it took him a moment to recognise Jarla, partly because it was the first time he’d seen her face without its whorish mask of paint. She looked younger, and more shy and tentative without it.

“Are you all right?” she panted.

Far from it. He was still shaking with terror, and his heart thumped as if he’d sprinted for miles. He was also gasping. He laboured to control his breathing, meanwhile insisting to himself that his sojourn in the realm of Chaos had only been a nightmare, a nightmare that was now over, and it blunted the edge of his fear. “Maybe.” His voice came out as a croak, and he realised his throat was dry and scratchy. “Is there water?”

“Yes.” She went to fetch it, and as it gurgled from pitcher to cup, he looked about. He was lying on the stained cot in Mama Solveig’s infirmary. Up close, the bed smelled of sweat, blood and mildew. Shafts of sunlight fell through the windows, and it appeared that except for Jarla, no one else was about.

She brought him his drink, and, parched though he was, he made himself sip it a little at a time, lest it make him sick. “Thank you. How long was I unconscious?”

“Hours.” She sat down on a little three-legged stool beside the cot. “It’s afternoon. Mama and Adolph had to leave, but I stayed with you. At the end, when you were yelling and flailing around, I was afraid you were going to hurt yourself, so I took hold of your arms.”

“Thank you,” he repeated. “You’re a good friend.”

She smiled and lowered her eyes. “It’s all right. Mama and Adolph would have stayed, but they had to do their work. My job… well, you know. It’s mostly at night. I asked before if you’re all right. Do you know yet?”

He took stock of himself. As best he could judge, his memories and character remained as they’d always been. Jarla wasn’t reacting to him as if his body had altered in some freakish fashion. Perhaps he’d suffered a frightening dream and nothing more.

Or perhaps not. He felt a strange feverish restlessness and had a throbbing tender spot in the middle of his forehead. He told himself that anyone newly awakened from a delirium would feel unwell, and that he’d likely smacked himself in the face while thrashing about.

“I’ll live,” he said, swinging his legs off the cot and sitting up, noticing in the process that someone, most likely Jarla, had removed his shoes. “I have to say, no thanks to anyone but you, and even you weren’t truthful about what was going to happen to me.”

She flinched. “I didn’t know. No one else has ever had such a strong reaction. Mama says it’s because you have an extraordinary aptitude for magic.”

“Really?” He hesitated. “In that case, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken harshly to the person who took care of me.”

In point of fact, he actually did feel a twinge of guilt, and had to remind himself she was a Chaos worshipper who’d turn on him instantly if she learned his true purpose. It would be idiotic to regard her as anything but a threat.

Or a resource.

Because it was plain that she liked him. He didn’t know why, except that over the course of their conversations, he’d always tried to appear friendly and never to show disdain for her profession. Perhaps, melancholy, lonely, and dubious of her own worth as she seemed to be, that was all it took to win her affection.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I can understand you being angry. To tell you the truth, I was upset, too. I was afraid the Changer would mark you right away, you’d have to go into the forest with Leopold and his company, and then I wouldn’t see you anymore. Not until I change.” She sighed. “If I ever do.”

Dieter peered at her. “Let me get this straight. You want to transform?”

“Yes. We all do. It’s a blessing from the god.”

“Then why do you and the others keep the icon set back from the area where you work your rituals? Why not bring it close and bask in its power as much as you can? I imagine you’d change pretty quickly.”

“Mama says that would be impious. Like trying to force the god’s hand. We need to worship as we’ve been taught. She says there’s a practical side to it, too. Every servant of the Master of Fortune can’t acquire his mark and flee to the woods, not all of us at once. He needs human beings here in the city, to smuggle supplies and new recruits to Leopold, and to discover the army’s plans and pass those along. I help with that part. Sometimes the soldiers talk when they… spend time with me.”

“Well, maybe it’s because I lack understanding, but I’m glad the god hasn’t got around to changing you yet. If he had, I never would have met you, and besides that, I like your face the way it is.”

Jarla blushed. Dieter wondered how best to follow up on his flattery, and then the door groaned open. Mama Solveig doddered through, looked at her two acolytes sitting opposite one another, and smiled.

“Dieter,” she said, “awake at last.”

“Yes.” He pondered how to speak to her and decided that at least a little resentment was in order. Any other reaction might seem unnatural and accordingly suspicious. “I appreciate Jarla staying with me, but you’re the healer. Why weren’t you trying to help me?”

“Because you weren’t sick,” Mama said, hobbling closer. “The Changer’s touch is a blessing, not an illness. What did you dream?”

He hesitated. “A world where everything kept changing. Armies of daemons.”

“And it was all wonderful and beautiful, wasn’t it?”

“Well… yes.” In a bizarre way, it had been. He’d just been too frightened to realise until now.

“Yet there you sit complaining, just because you had to go to sleep to see it. Don’t you realise you’re being foolish?”

“Maybe, but I never had a seizure before.”

“And in your place, I’m sure I’d be concerned, too. But I doubt you’ll have any more. As I said, it’s not that you’ve fallen sick. You’ve become one of the elect, and since that was what you wanted, I hope you can forgive me for giving it to you.”

He sighed. “Well, I suppose. Why not, considering that I came out of it all right.” The tender spot on his forehead gave him a twinge.

Mama Solveig smiled. “I’m so glad. I’d hate to think we were mistaken about you, and you’d end up regretting it if I did. Do you feel well enough to talk a while longer, or would you like to rest?”

“We can talk.”

“Good.” The old woman turned to Jarla. “Why don’t you go down by the barracks, dear? Earn some money and see what you can learn.”

Jarla pouted as if she found the suggestion uncongenial. But she merely said, “Yes, Mama,” and took her leave.

“She’s a sweet girl,” Mama said as Jarla pulled the door shut behind her, “but Adolph could make a nasty enemy.”

Dieter hesitated. “I don’t want enemies. I want to fit in and serve the cause.”

“Of course you do, and that’s one of the nice things about joining the coven. Perhaps the rest of the world is against you, but you have a family now, brothers and sisters who look after their own. For instance, Jarla told me you’ve been slaving away for pennies catching vermin, and sleeping in a hostel for beggars and tramps. We can do better than that. For the time being, you can live here and be my helper in the healing trade.”

So she could keep an eye on him and try to make sure he was a genuine convert? Maybe, but conversely, it ought to facilitate the process of spying on her. “I’d like that. Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome. It will be nice to have company in this gloomy old hole. But I’m sure you understand, a family doesn’t work if people only take. They need to give back, also.”

“I can see that.”

“I knew you would. So the coven has to consider what each new recruit can contribute, to his newfound kindred and the cause we serve, and in your case, the answer is plain: your magic.”

His forehead throbbed. “What about it?”

Mama hesitated as though calculating precisely how much she wanted to share with a new recruit. “When we talked before, I mentioned that the Red Crown supports those who seek to topple the Empire by force of arms.”

“Specifically, someone named Leopold and his comrades in the forest.”

She stared at him. “And how do you know that?”

“Jarla mentioned them.”

The old woman sighed. “She’s a good girl, but too chatty. Apparently I need to remind her that it’s for me to decide what you learn and when. But since she’s already blathered about it: yes, Leopold Mann leads a band of warriors who all bear the mark of the god. Today, they operate as bandits, but they aspire to become a genuine rebel army. The Red Crown sends them new recruits and supplies, and warns them of efforts to locate and destroy them. My hope is that your skills can help.”

“Well, perhaps.” Perhaps, for the time being, he’d have to aid the Red Crown in small ways in order to obtain the information that would ultimately bring them down.

“But even that isn’t the main thing,” Mama Solveig said. “You’ve seen the sanctuary where we perform our rituals.” Dieter thought of the grotesque appearance of the icon, the cold, hard feel of it against his lips, the pulses of psychic force that hammered from it, and his stomach churned. “Maybe you noticed a scarcity of books and documents.”

“Now that you mention it.”

“I told you about the great treasure trove of knowledge our leader possesses. He’s entrusted us with a few fragmentary texts from that library, and requires us to puzzle over them until they give up their secrets and so enhance our sorcery. He will then lend us another chapter from a grimoire or something comparable, and the process will start anew.”

Dieter shook his head. “I don’t understand. If the goal is to make you—us—powerful, so we can serve our god as ably as possible, then why not give us all the materials we need to advance quickly? Why not come and instruct us?”

Mama Solveig smiled. “Many reasons, or so I’ve been told. The Master of Change can’t teach you himself because no one but coven leaders ever sees him. It’s a part of the secrecy that keeps us all safe. Besides, learning this way is a sort of test. By passing it, we prove our fitness to enter the deeper mysteries.”

“It still doesn’t strike me as an efficient way to approach the task of overthrowing the Empire and changing the fundamental nature of the world.”

“To be honest, I’ve thought the same. But we have to recognise that the god’s designs are both vaster and subtler than mortal minds can comprehend. From time to time, his will, as conveyed by the Master of Change, may impress you as perverse and self-defeating. At such moments, you must simply cling to your faith.”

“All right. If you tell me so, then I accept it. Anyway, we were talking about how I can make myself useful.”

“And isn’t it clear? Your father has already trained you in an occult tradition. Your spells were strong enough to destroy a creature of Chaos. You’re a powerful, knowledgeable warlock, and I suspect that when you study the texts in our possession, you’ll discover things none of us have grasped. So I want you to devote much of your time to doing precisely that, and to teaching the rest of us what you learn.”

He felt a surge of elation, of eagerness, as if he’d found the proper outlet for the restless energy seething inside him. Every wizard lived to learn new spells and secrets, and he was no exception. He’d retired to Halmbrandt for that very purpose, purely for the satisfaction it promised, with no particular intent of ever putting the results of his research to practical use. And here was Mama Solveig offering him the opportunity to pore over lore he could have acquired nowhere else. It was marve—

He realised what he was thinking and felt a jolt of dismay, because the situation wasn’t marvellous, it was dangerous. It was only by limiting himself to a single discipline, to the energies derived from only one of the eight winds, that a magician held the Chaos implicit in all sorcery in check. To do otherwise was to court corruption. Had a youthful Dieter dared to dabble in alchemy, he might well have degenerated into the murderous bandit of his nightmare.

Whereas, if the apprentice had immersed himself in Dark Magic, a few years might have sufficed to strip him of his humanity entirely. Manageable if not benign in isolation, the eight lores formed poison when mixed together. Dark lore was virulent in and of itself because it immediately and automatically opened a practitioner to Chaos. It could pollute a wizard as quickly and profoundly as Mama Solveig’s icon.

Trapped among the cultists until he completed his task, Dieter had no hope of avoiding all exposure to their arcane secrets. But it was essential that he limit it.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but I doubt I can harvest anything from the texts that you haven’t already discovered for yourselves. I’m just not as powerful or learned as you think I am.”

Her eyes narrowed in their nests of wrinkles. “You killed the fiery serpent.”

“I was lucky. Besides, as Adolph said, he and I did it together.”

“Hm. Well, in any case, someone schooled you in magic.”

“My father knew some spells by rote, and taught them to me that same way. I have no idea what makes them work, and I couldn’t create a new one if my life depended on it.”

The old woman sighed. “What a pity. I had such high hopes of you, and now you almost seem to be trying to make me think you’ll be of no use at all. You really wouldn’t want me to think that.”

“No, and it isn’t what I meant. I certainly have something to contribute.”

“Of course you do, dear. I never doubted it. Now come take your first look at the parchments.”

He felt another irrational thrill of anticipation, and fought to quash it. “What? I explained—”

“That the rest of us shouldn’t expect anything special from you. I understand. But naturally, you’ll still study the lore like the rest of us.”

“Naturally.” He couldn’t think of any way to refuse. It occurred to him that he should have claimed to be illiterate, but it was too late now. Anyone in his position would have mentioned it sooner had it actually been the case.

Perhaps he could unfocus his eyes and rest them on the documents without actually reading. That might protect him from the venom they contained.

It would be dark at the centre of the cavernous cellar, the shafts of dusty golden light falling through the windows notwithstanding. Mama lit the oil lamp while Dieter found his shoes. The midwife then led him deeper into her domain, and, sketching her arcane sigil on the stale air, revealed the coven’s hidden shrine. Pouncing into visibility, the icon of Tzeentch seemed to shift ever so slightly atop its plinth at the far end of the space.

Dieter braced himself to withstand the poisonous atmosphere of the shrine. It made his head throb and his belly squirm, but it wasn’t as noxious as it had been the first time. Perhaps a person actually could get used to it. Or maybe his initiation had granted him a measure of resistance.

Mama Solveig set the oil lamp atop the lectern. “You’re still a young man with young eyes. This should be enough light for you to read by. Later on, you won’t even need this much. Once you become familiar with the papers—or perhaps I should say, once they come to know you—the words and drawings will shine with their own inner light.”

Trembling, Dieter took his place behind the wooden stand. He felt frightened but exhilarated too, as he had the first time a woman granted him her favours.

Which was crazy. The two situations were nothing alike. He made his vision blur, resolved again to read not a single letter, and lowered his gaze.

Despite his unfocused eyes, meaning surged up at him like a striking snake, and the opening words of an invocation to Tzeentch impressed themselves on his comprehension. He couldn’t imagine how, for many of them were unfamiliar, derived, perhaps, from the same unknown language Mama Solveig had spoken at the conclusion of last night’s ritual. Yet something of their import conveyed itself nonetheless.

He told himself to wrench his gaze away, even if it compromised his mission. But he couldn’t. The writing exerted a fascination stronger than his fear.

Here, contained in a single line, was a crushing rebuttal to the sane, common-sense notion that a thing either existed or did not. A little further along, the author used a term referring to the brittle, flimsy composition of all the mortal world, a word somehow redolent of loathing and contempt even if the reader had never encountered it before.

The word infected Dieter with the sentiments it connoted. He yearned to destroy something.

Then air gusted, and the wavering flame of the oil lamp blew out, plunging him into darkness.

Fortunately, the ink on the parchments didn’t glow for Dieter, not yet, and, no longer able to make out the blasphemous words or much of anything else, he finally managed to jerk his gaze away.

When he did, he sensed that Mama Solveig was no longer standing at his side. Nor could any trace be seen of the light falling through the windows set at intervals along the tops of the walls. The murk was all but absolute.

He groped for the oil lamp, took it in his hand, and murmured an incantation. The ceramic body of the vessel began to glow with its own phosphorescence, shedding illumination without the necessity of fuel or flame.

With the light came the urge to return to his reading. Straining against the impulse, making sure he didn’t so much as glance at the papers atop the lectern, he raised the lamp and peered about.

He still couldn’t see any sign of Mama Solveig, her infirmary or living area, the windows or the walls. The cellar appeared larger than before, too large for his light to reveal all of it.

“Mama Solveig?” he called. His voice echoed. No one answered.

It occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t truly awakened after all. It was possible he was still delirious. Still trapped in the heart of Chaos.

But no. He didn’t believe it, refused to believe he might still be incapable of distinguishing between hallucination and reality. This was actually happening, and that meant he’d fallen victim to an enchantment, conceivably an effect he himself had unwittingly evoked from the forbidden text.

The simplest way to cope with the magic and the disorientation it produced might be simply to walk in a straight line. With luck, he’d move out of the illusion that made the cellar seem limitless, and the bounds of the space would come back into view. At worst, he’d bump into a wall, and then could feel his way along it until he found the door.

He took three steps, then froze when he belatedly perceived that he was walking directly towards the icon. Did the sculpture’s draconic snarl pull ever so slightly into something more closely resembling a leer?

No, damn it, of course it hadn’t. He turned his back on the image and headed in the opposite direction.

Deviating from his course only to avoid one broken, abandoned article or another, he passed a succession of brick columns. Too many. Finally he glanced backwards. The lectern, pentacle and racks of magical implements were all but lost in the gloom. Another pace or two and he wouldn’t be able to distinguish them at all anymore, and without that point of reference, he’d be completely lost.

No, he wouldn’t. Not in a space that surely remained finite however it currently appeared, and not when he had divination to guide him if need be. So why did panic keep welling up inside him?

He decided to seek guidance without further delay, and never mind that it seemed ridiculous to resort to sorcery simply to find his way to the edge of an enclosed space. The magic wasn’t likely to speak as clearly here as it would if it could write its message across the sky, but a breeze should kick up to nudge him along in the proper direction.

He cleared his throat, then declaimed words of power. Spiders skittered madly in their webs, and his ears ached as though he’d dived deep underwater.

On the final syllable of the incantation, the air moved, but not as he’d anticipated. It gusted in one direction, then another, then whirled and howled around him, catching his clothing and making it rustle and flap, until it abruptly stopped moving altogether.

Dieter ran his fingers through his sweaty, tousled hair. The divination hadn’t pointed the way to the door. In fact, it had seemed to be saying it was impossible to walk out of the enchantment. If so, then maybe he had reason to be frightened after all.

At the periphery of his vision, shadows stirred. He jerked around, but by that time, everything was still again.

“Mama?” he shouted.

Only the dwindling echoes of his own voice replied.

Uncertain if he’d truly seen anything at all, keeping watch from the corner of his eye, he moved, and after a time glimpsed motion. His stalker was slinking from the cover of one support column to the next while gradually creeping closer. It was interesting to observe that once again, the elderly midwife was moving without any hint of unsteadiness or frailty.

Whether she tottered about or prowled like a hunting cat, the knowledge of her proximity had a calming effect on Dieter, because now he at least felt reasonably certain he understood what was happening. The cultist was using her own magic to play tricks on him, and once he got his hands on her, it would likely be easy enough to persuade her to end the game.

So he waited until she was quite near, then wheeled and ran at the column she was hiding behind. “Got you!”

A creature, possessed of a somewhat manlike shape but utterly inhuman nonetheless, sprang out from behind the support to meet him. It was gaunt and male, with dark hide and a head like a spider’s, and, now that it was near enough, gave off a sharp acidic smell. The light of his lamp glinted on the countless bulging, faceted eyes peering not just from its head but its torso as well, its wet, gnashing mandibles, and the blade of its upraised battle-axe. It gave a hideous rasping cry and swung its weapon at Dieter’s face.

Somehow he managed to arrest his forward momentum and fling himself back. The axe whizzed by a finger-length in front of his nose, and at the same instant, he lost his balance. When he fell, the ceramic lamp shattered against I he floor, spattering his hand with oil.

The spider-thing loomed over him and lifted its axe for a second stroke. He forced himself to remain still—if he moved early, the creature would only compensate—and then, when the weapon hurtled down, rolled to the side. The axe sheared into the floor.

If the gods were kind, it would stick there, too, at least for a heartbeat, but the creature immediately heaved it free and raised it to threaten Dieter anew. With the thing right on top of him and attacking so relentlessly, he couldn’t stop dodging long enough to cast a spell.

Nor was it likely he’d evade the axe much longer. So, in desperation, he kicked with both feet at the spider-thing’s spindly leg.

Bone cracked. The spider-thing staggered, then vanished as suddenly and completely as a bursting soap bubble.

Panting, Dieter rose and lifted his light. With only a broken piece of lamp left in his oily hand, the enchanted implement shined less brightly than before.

Still, it sufficed to reveal the shadowy forms of other spider-things, all stalking in his direction.

Could the creatures actually hurt him? It seemed likely. The one he’d kicked had felt solid to the touch, and its axe had split the floor.

Yet he was fairly certain they were, if not wholly illusory, at least artificial. For if they were real, they were plainly creatures of Chaos, and it was all but inconceivable that Mama Solveig was powerful enough to summon so many so quickly, or that any other warlock could and would dispatch so many to invade her home.

In other words, as he’d suspected previously, all the alarming things that were happening were manifestations of one elaborate phantasmagoric trick, and, since he’d failed to escape the enchantment by other means, it was time to try to tear it apart. He would have had a better chance under the open sky, or if he felt more himself, but it was pointless to dwell on that.

He took a deep breath, declaimed the opening syllables of a counter spell, and slashed his hands through mystic passes. The spider-things charged.

Points of light, arrayed in patterns like constellations, appeared in the air and revolved around him. Outside the building, thunder boomed as if the heavens were cheering him on.

The creatures vanished, the dissolution wiping them away from the tops of their heads down to their feet. It was as if they were sand paintings spilled and obliterated by a witless attempt to stand them upright.

The cellar seemed to draw in on itself like a fist half-clenching as the walls sprang back into view. Dieter squinted against the reappearance of the light from the windows. After his time in the dark, the diffuse, filtered glow seemed bright.

Hands clapped softly. He pivoted and saw Mama Solveig standing a few paces away. “Well done,” she said. “Although it’s a pity about the lamp.”

He felt a savage urge to attack her, but managed to resist it. Perhaps, even knowing what he knew, it helped that she was such a persuasive counterfeit of a kindly, feeble old granny. “I hoped you enjoyed your prank,” he gritted. “That first spider-thing nearly chopped me to pieces.”

She looked shocked at the suggestion. “Oh, no, dear, it only seemed that way. I would never have let you come to harm.”

“So you say, but can I believe you? You also said, or at least implied, that your magic isn’t especially powerful.”

“It isn’t. I’m strongest here at home, where I practise my devotions and my link to Chaos never fails. Where I’ve laid charms to aid my conjuring and help me escape if the witch hunters ever call for me. Yet even so, when you made up your mind to try, you had no difficulty breaking free of my glamour.”

“Why did you catch me in it in the first place?”

She smiled. “To test you. To see if your abilities were as modest as you claim. Plainly, they’re not, so why did you lie?”

He groped for an acceptable answer and decided something close to the truth might serve. He hoped so, because it was the only thing that came to mind. “I want to learn as much as I can, for its own sake and to bring the Empire down. I do. It’s just that things are happening too fast. After I kissed the icon, my visions were… troubling. I’m still trying to decide what they mean and how to feel about them, and already you want me to immerse myself in dark lore and contend with that as well? I’m not sure I can bear up under the pressure.”

“Don’t be a silly goose. Of course you can. Have faith that the Changer brought you here for a reason.”

“I want to believe—”

“Then do. I understand what you’re going through. Every new convert has misgivings. All your life, everyone has told you Chaos and evil are the same thing. Then, when you first catch a glimpse of it, it is disturbing, because it’s so different and so much bigger than this sickly, drab little world we inhabit.

“But as you persevere in the faith,” she continued, “you’ll come to see how glorious it is. That it’s the only ideal worthy of your adoration. But even if it were otherwise, you’ve already pledged yourself to the god, and he’s accepted your troth. It’s too late for second thoughts.”

“In other words, stop shirking and study the damn papers.”

“‘Shirking’ is too severe a judgement, but yes.”

All right, he thought. If she insisted, she could closet him with the documents for hours on end. That didn’t mean he had to read them. Now that he knew what he was up against, his will was strong enough to resist the temptation.

Wasn’t it?

His forehead gave him a pang, and, in the gloom in the middle of the cellar, something clicked. It was probably a rat’s claw tapping on a hard surface. Surely not a carved stone monstrosity changing position.

 

* * *

 

Jarla’s home, if one cared to dignify it with that term, was a single cramped box of a room adjacent to the street and handy to the barracks and the marketplace, a place she could bring men willing to pay extra for privacy. Adolph hesitated before pounding on the door. Because the bitch might be with such a customer even now, and if so, he’d rather not know it, even though he understood her whoring aided the cult.

Even though, in a strange, angry, hurtful sort of way, it sometimes excited him to imagine it.

He rapped on the cheap pine panel. For several heartbeats, no one answered. Then Jarla called, “Yes?”

He scowled. She generally hesitated before answering a knock or doing a good many other things, for that matter. It was one of many annoying habits she had yet to abandon no matter how often he corrected her.

“It’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”

The door was warped, and bent slightly in its frame as she tried to pull it open. After a moment, it jerked loose, and Jarla peered out at him.

She was fully clothed, and, looking over her shoulder, he saw that the room had no other occupants. He wondered what she’d been doing shut away by herself, then noticed the brass pendant she was wearing around her neck. It was a representation of Tzeentch in his draconic guise, but simplified and stylised into an essentially abstract figure. The average person wouldn’t recognise it for what it was.

But many a witch hunter would. Adolph hastily entered the room and shoved the door shut behind him to hide the damning display from public view.

“You’ve been practising your cantrips again,” he said. It was the only reason she’d dare to wear the pendant anywhere but inside Mama’s hidden sanctuary.

“Well, yes,” Jarla said.

“I thought you’d given up on ever mastering them.” It had seemed only sensible that she should. As the coven’s experimentation had revealed, she possessed a spark of mystical ability, but it seemed too feeble to accomplish anything useful.

“I had. But if the Purple Hand are going to try to kill us, I need some way of defending myself.”

It made a certain amount of sense, but he could tell she was keeping something back. “Is that all there is to it?”

She hesitated. “Mama Solveig said that, since Dieter already knows some magic, maybe he’ll discover things in the papers that we’ve missed.”

Adolph sneered. “I doubt it.”

“Maybe, with his help, I really can learn. Maybe he can teach us all.”

He slapped her, and the crack resounded in the enclosed space. Eyes wide, pressing her hand to her cheek, she shrank back against her rumpled bed.

“Do you think,” he demanded, “he can do better than me?”

“No! It’s just… you figured out a lot, but not everything. Mama and the others teased out some of the secrets before you did. So that just shows, a fresh set of eyes could be useful, especially if Dieter already knows things the rest of us don’t.”

Adolph grunted.

In point of fact, he felt torn. He was avid to acquire more learning, more power, and Jarla, for once, was right: Dieter might be the proper guide to lead them all deeper into the mysteries.

Yet it galled him to see a newcomer so favoured and respected. Not long ago, Adolph had been a mere journeyman scribe recording the minutiae of other men’s lives. The Cult of the Red Crown had raised him from insignificance as he’d discovered talents for both sorcery and the crimes that aided Leopold Mann. Mama Solveig might be the high priestess of the coven, but her followers had come to regard him as her unofficial lieutenant and heir apparent. He had no intention of relinquishing that status and the good things that came with it.

Good things that included Jarla. She was just a stupid slut, to be discarded as soon as something better came along, but until then, she belonged to him, and he wouldn’t let anyone steal her.

He decided he needed to walk a middle course. He’d learn whatever Dieter had to teach, but at the same time, defend his position and prerogatives.

He could start by reminding Jarla whose property she was. “Take off your clothes,” he said, “and fetch me the rope.”

 

Dieter poked the corner of his toast into the round yellow yolk, puncturing it. Mama Solveig had prepared his eggs just the way he liked them.

He took a bite, chewed, the morsel crunching, and closed his eyes in pleasure.

“Is it all right?” the old woman asked.

He swallowed. “Better than all right.” Indeed, the meals Mama Solveig prepared were tastier and more plentiful than any he’d enjoyed since the day Otto Krieger overturned his life, just as her cellar, squalid though it was, was luxurious compared to a doss house or sleeping outdoors. He still felt restless and irritable, still worried about the twinges in his forehead, but for the moment at least, his new living arrangements, together with his liberation from the noxious toil of rat catching, had brightened his mood.

It almost seemed conceivable that he might survive this lunatic errand after all.

“Should I make more?” Mama Solveig asked.

“No, thank you. You already made more than I can finish.”

Her greasy tin plate and utensils in hand, the healer rose from the rickety, ring-scarred table, a cast-off, by the looks of it, from some tavern or other. “Then I’ll start clearing and washing up.”

“Leave that for me.”

“I most certainly will not. It’s women’s work, and besides, I like taking care of people. It’s why I became a healer.”

And a Chaos worshipper, he wondered, forcing me to wallow in filth and helping mutants waylay innocent travellers? With the thought came a sudden pang of loathing that burst his appreciation of petty comforts and doting care like a soap bubble, and he had to struggle to keep his face from contorting into a scowl.

The mad thing was that he suspected, had he asked out loud how she reconciled her dedication to the healing arts with her service to Chaos, she would have justified it somehow. As he’d observed before, the cultists weren’t crazy, it was subtler than that, but their devotions twisted their thinking.

How long would it be before they twisted his? Or had the process begun already?

He finished his breakfast and washed it down with the last gulp of water from his cup. Then Mama Solveig took up her wicker basket of healing implements and led him back into the hidden sanctuary.

His heart thumped and his meal abruptly weighed like a stone in his stomach as they neared the icon. Mama Solveig patted him on the forearm. “It’s all right, dear. You don’t have to go near it today. It’s too soon, I think. Just stand back and watch.”

Reciting a prayer, she doddered right up to the coiled black sculpture, then opened her basket. She took out a bandage and rubbed it over the image as if to dust and polish it.

Next came a ceramic jar, evidently the repository for some poultice, ointment or medicinal powder. She rubbed her fingertip on the icon, stiffening when a jolt of its power evidently stabbed into the digit, then swished it around inside the container.

She proceeded in the same manner for a while, contaminating a goodly portion of her supplies. Meanwhile, the entire basket was presumably soaking up vileness simply by virtue of its nearness to the statue.

Finally she said, “That should do it, and about time, too. We have a lot of calls to make, and these old legs can’t walk as fast as they used to.” She recited a prayer of thanks as she bobbed her head and backed away.

When they emerged from the cellar, he blinked, and realised it was the first time he’d been outside in the daylight since Jarla had drugged him. The blue sky, breeze and mundane bustle of the streets seemed a bracing relief from dark, enclosed spaces, secrecy, and abominations. But it lasted only until he remembered the Watch, presumably keeping an eye out for a fugitive answering his description, Krieger’s agents, spying to make sure he didn’t run away, and the Purple Hand, quite possibly lurking about awaiting another chance to strike at their rivals. After that, he felt vulnerable and exposed.

Mama Solveig clung to his arm. Proximity to the taint in her dangling basket made his forehead itch. Her neighbours called out greetings as she passed, and she responded as if she were everyone’s doting granny.

At length they reached their first stop, a brick boarding house as smoke-and soot-stained as the one in which she made her home. The old woman looked up the shadowy stairwell and sighed. “This is the part that’s a trial. All the climbing up and down.”

Maybe so, but they tramped all the way to the top floor, and she never called a halt to rest.

She tapped on a door, and a feeble voice called, “Come in.” Mama Solveig led Dieter into a small room stinking of spoiled food and sweat, and crammed with cots and pallets. A young woman with a small, skinny frame and a distended belly lay on her side on one of the straw mattresses. All the other occupants had presumably gone to work.

“This is Dieter, my new helper,” Mama Solveig said. “Dieter, this is Sophie.”

“Hello,” Sophie said in the same thin little voice.

“Help me down,” Mama said, and Dieter steadied her and supported her weight as she lowered herself to her knees. “How are you getting along?” she asked.

“It still hurts,” Sophie said, “and the baby kicks and squirms and makes it worse. Is he supposed to do it all day and all night? I can’t sleep.”

“Poor dear,” Mama said. “I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time.”

Sophie shook her head, spilling a lock of wavy brown hair over her eye. “I can stand the pain if I have to, but I can’t lose this one, too. Is he going to be all right?”

“Let’s see.” The midwife began an examination of sorts, first pressing Sophie’s abdomen at various points. When she pulled up her patient’s skirts, Dieter felt a pang of embarrassment, and wondered if he ought to turn away. But perhaps an assistant healer was expected to observe even the most intimate portions of the process. Sophie must think it appropriate, for she didn’t object. Or maybe she was simply too desperate and exhausted for modesty to matter any longer.

Finally Mama Solveig said, “Well.”

“Tell me,” Sophie pleaded.

“I think both you and the child will be all right.”

Tears welled up in Sophie’s eyes, and she blinked to hold them back. “Thank you!”

“Mind you, you must stay in bed, and you have to keep taking the powder and applying the balm. I brought more of both.” She folded back the lid of the basket and extracted two ceramic jars.

Dieter had understood the point of contaminating the medicines and believed himself ready for this moment. Now he discovered he wasn’t. Sophie seemed little more than a child, and the baby in her womb was more helpless and innocent still. He yearned to grab Mama Solveig and fling her away from her victims.

But he couldn’t. It would wreck his mission, and it was inconceivable that a relentless brute like Krieger would agree that the good so accomplished outweighed the opportunity lost.

“Thank you!” Sophie repeated. “I’ll drink some right now.” Trembling, she pulled the cork from one of the containers.

Mama Solveig smiled up at Dieter. “She has a cup right here beside her bed, and I see a pitcher in the corner.”

He fetched the water. The moment felt both horrific and surreal, not unlike his vision of Chaos. He filled the pewter cup. Sophie took it in her dainty hand, spilled a dash of grey powder into it, mixed the contents with her fingertip, and raised it to her lips. Which, he supposed, made him a poisoner. His guts squirmed as if he’d swallowed a toxin himself.

Sophie, however, smiled. Apparently the medicine had eased her soreness, or calmed the agitated life writhing and thrusting about inside her.

As he and Mama Solveig hiked back down the shadowy, creaking stairs, Dieter struggled to hold his tongue. Even though they appeared to be alone, it wasn’t safe to talk about the cult and its atrocities in public. Besides, he was afraid that if he said anything, the old woman might discern the depth of his disgust and dismay.

Yet he found he couldn’t contain himself Perhaps the constant gnawing restlessness was to blame.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

She turned her head to smile at him. “Understand what, dear?”

“If you transform a grown man, and he wants to stay alive afterwards, he may well sneak away and join Leopold Mann. But what’s the point of altering Sophie or her child?”

“I know, Sophie seems like such a delicate little thing, but if she changes, she may be very different. Even if she’s not, the raiders will put her to use in one way or another. As for the infant, it might grow up more quickly than an ordinary child. Some of them do. If not, well, who’s to say Leopold and his band won’t still be fighting a dozen years hence? We hope to have our victory by then, but we can’t be sure. Anyway, altering folk is worthwhile for its own sake. You might even say it’s a sacrament.”

“Even when it results in witch hunters throwing a newborn baby on a pyre?”

“Yes, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. You’d be surprised how often it doesn’t. Parents are inclined to love their babies no matter what form they take. If the child shows signs of being different, they’re often in no hurry to call a priest or witch hunter to carry it away and kill it any more than they’d rush to throw away their own lives. Instead, they ask a trusted healer if anything can be done to reverse the change. Sadly, I have to tell them no, but I do know a way for a sport to survive. Then they give the wee one into my keeping, or perhaps they even accompany it into the forest. Leopold has a few such folk in his band, mothers and fathers who couldn’t bear to separate from their children.”

“I guess I see. Well, except for one thing: you betrayed the Purple Hand to the authorities for trying to taint the water supply and change people. Basically, the same thing you’re doing yourself.”

“Yes. The Red Crown had to choose the greater good. It’s always worthwhile to spread the blessing of the god, but it’s vital to suppress the Purple Hand before their doomed strategy places all our goals out of reach.” She chuckled. “Or before they manage to suppress us.”

“Right.” He held the door for Mama Solveig, then followed her stooped, hobbling form out into the sunlight.

 

The parchments usually reposed atop the lectern because the cultists read aloud from them during their rituals and observances. But a worshipper seeking to unravel their mysteries in solitude was welcome to do so sitting down, and so Dieter carried both a candle and a rickety chair into the hidden shrine.

Out in the front of the cellar, Mama Solveig hummed while she crushed dried berries with her mortar and pestle.

Heart thumping, Dieter came close enough to pick up the documents with their smell of old dry paper, then froze, paralysed by a sudden acute perception of the filthy power seething inside them. Touching them now would be like thrusting his hand into a tangle of adders, or thrusting a needle into his own eye.

But he had to do it and do it quickly, before Mama Solveig noticed his reluctance. He made himself take them up, shuddered, and sat down. He tried to steel himself for the next and even more difficult phase of his ordeal.

He now knew it wouldn’t be possible merely to pretend to study the papers while avoiding comprehension altogether. If he didn’t demonstrate at least a minimal understanding, his fellow cultists would realise he’d shirked.

Thus his task was to absorb a certain number of superficialities while evading actual enlightenment. It should be possible, considering that the cultists claimed it was difficult to puzzle out the deeper meaning of the texts even if one studied assiduously.

He shuffled through the parchments. Some of the pages were vellum and some, linen. He noted a variety of inks, hands and scripts. As best he could judge, he was looking at a minimum of six different manuscripts written over the course of the last few centuries.

He decided to skim the document on the bottom. With luck, maybe it wouldn’t stab revelation into his head like the one he’d examined the first time.

It didn’t, at least not right away. It proved to be something of a metaphysical treatise, devoid of both the fervid exhortations and exotic words that figured in the other work. Its vileness lay simply in its trenchant argument that Chaos was not merely omnipotent but omnipresent. Order was only an illusion, and thus, in the truest sense, the stable universe of mundane human perception neither existed nor ever could.

Despite himself, Dieter gradually grew intrigued by the elegance of the author’s syllogisms even as he was repelled by their conclusions. But more than that, he was curious. As far as he could tell, the essay didn’t contain even a hint as to how one might go about actually performing Dark Magic, and come to think of it, the text he’d read previously hadn’t, either.

And thank the stars for that! It would protect him. Yet he knew the papers truly must contain such instruction, because Mama Solveig and Adolph had benefited from it, and he couldn’t help wondering how such a thing could be. As any true scholar would, he felt a yen to solve the trick of the concealment. Was it possible it would be safe to do so if he stopped with that, and refrained from actually poring over the secret content?

He reread the treatise, more attentively this time, then took up the next document, in its essence a rambling, disjointed paean of praise to Tzeentch.

He read every text, then started over. His eyes smarted, and he tried to blink the discomfort away. The skin on his forehead crawled, and he rubbed it.

So gradually that at first he imagined his eyes were merely playing tricks on him, certain words, syllables and individual letters became more prominent, as if rising slightly from the page while the surrounding text sank into it. Enough, he thought. That’s how it works. I understand now, and I should break away. But it seemed only natural to run his eyes over the emphasised characters and decipher the message they’d picked out.

It proved to be a set of instructions for evoking and reading portents, signs that would speak clearly whether a mage stood beneath the open sky or not, because the spell drew its strength not from the Blue Wind but rather a force abundant everywhere. The possibilities would have excited any astromancer, and Dieter was no exception. He murmured the words of power and stretched out his hand.

A clot of shadow writhed into being in his palm. It was cold and soft, and felt like squirming snow. For a heartbeat it resembled a living creature, a knot of coils not unlike Tzeentch’s icon, and then it flowed into a firm and static form, arms extending in a circle from a central hub to make a wheel, and glyphs hanging at various points on the radii.

Which was to say, it resembled a horoscope, and though the symbols were unfamiliar to him, as he stared, he began to discern the significance of the pattern: Destruction. Betrayal. Degradation. Damnation.

Alarmed, he cried out and flailed his arm, and his creation vanished.

Something glowed at the bottom edge of his vision. He glanced down to behold the characters on the parchments shining with their own luminescence.

“You see?” asked a baritone voice. Dieter jerked his head around. The hooded priest from his vision stood next to Tzeentch. “You can’t get away from it. The only reasonable course is to wallow in it.”

Dieter screamed, recoiled, and somehow managed to overturn his chair. Crashing down on the floor knocked some of the panic out of him. As he scrambled to his knees, he still felt frightened, but he also drew breath and raised his hands to cast darts of light.

But he didn’t need to. The priest had disappeared, and the ink on the parchments had stopped shining.

He drew a ragged breath, and told himself the priest hadn’t really been there. His imagination had played a trick on him.

It might have been more reassuring if he’d ever hallucinated before. Or if he hadn’t just been filling his head with the outlandish but strangely persuasive proposition that the distinction between reality and nightmare was fundamentally a false one.

It occurred to him that Mama Solveig must have heard his shout and the bang he’d made falling over in his chair. She must be hobbling over to see if he was all right. He turned in the direction of her shabby little infirmary.

She wasn’t there. At some point, she’d gone out without him noticing, and that wasn’t the most disquieting part. It was dark outside the windows. Several hours had slipped by while the parchments held him entranced.

It was more evidence of just how insidious their influence was. Not that he needed it, considering that he’d just performed a work of Dark Magic.

He had to extricate himself from this situation as soon as possible, which meant he needed to avail himself of opportunities like the one Mama Solveig had now provided. He rose, took up the candle, and proceeded to search the old woman’s work and living spaces.

Making sure to leave everything as he found it, he opened drawers, boxes and chests, and rummaged through their meagre contents, looking for anything that hinted at the Master of Change’s true identity or the location where he met with his lieutenants. Unfortunately, if such an item existed, Mama Solveig had hidden it well. In the end, unwise as it seemed to attempt any more magic so soon after performing the Chaotic spell, he cast a divination. To his relief, it didn’t have any adverse consequences, but it didn’t point to anything helpful, either.

He should have known, he thought glumly, that it wouldn’t be that easy. Nothing else had been. He wondered what he ought to do next and felt a fierce, sudden craving to return to the parchments.

No! He’d already learned more than enough to satisfy the Red Crown for the time being. But then again, why not? The texts were inescapable in any case. He’d have to expose himself to their influence over and over for as long as he remained here. So why not learn as much as he could as quickly as possible? It was conceivable that he’d acquire some bit of knowledge or a spell that could solve all his problems.

He looked into the shrine, and Tzeentch leered back at him. The writing on the papers began to gleam. Then someone tapped softly on the door.

He scurried to the source of the noise and peered out the peephole. Jarla’s pretty, painted face was on the other side. He threw open the door.

“I should be working,” she said, “but I wanted to say hello.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders. “I’m so glad to see you!” He realised his voice was too shrill, too agitated, and tried to bring it under control. “Mama gave me a little money. Will you take supper with me?”

Jarla smiled. “Yes, I’d love to.”

“Then come on.” He seized her hand, and, struggling not to stride along so quickly that he’d end up dragging her, conducted her up the stairs and along the street.