The Enemy Within by Richard Lee Byers - (ebook by Undead) Read Free Book Online Page B

Dieter’s
abilities had impressed him, and that he felt it important to convey an accurate
sense of them. Yet at the same time, he couldn’t bear to admit that his own
magic had proved less potent if not entirely useless.
    When he finished, Mama Solveig gave Dieter another smile.
“Thank you for helping my friends, and after they drugged and threatened you,
too! It’s a debt we can never hope to repay. But the question remains, how did
you do it? Who are you really? Obviously, not the simple disgruntled peasant you
claimed to be.”
    Dieter took a deep breath. The moment had come, and now
they’d believe the new lies or they wouldn’t.
    “The story I told Jarla,” he said, “was partly true. Beastmen
did plunder my village, the crops grew strangely afterwards, and then the witch
hunters came to finish the task of destroying everything we had. What I lied
about was being a farmer. I’m a wyrd. What city folk call a hedge wizard. A
knack for a certain kind of magic runs in my family, and my father taught me to
use it. To help people, never to harm!”
    “We believe you,” Mama said.
    “I tried to help when the goat-men came, and I did save a few
people. Later, I tried my best to wash the taint from the soil and water. I just
wasn’t able. Yet when the witch hunters arrived, they came after me
immediately.”
    Mama Solveig nodded. “Because you had power you earned for
yourself. You didn’t go down on your belly and beg it from the colleges, or wear
the shackles that would have come with it. No matter how kindly your intentions,
people like you, simply by virtue of your existence, pose a threat to the
established order. The nobles and priests think they have to exterminate you or
you’ll one day topple them from their perches.” She leered, providing another
momentary glimpse of the fierce spirit lurking behind her mild-looking exterior.
“As you will. As we will.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe.” He’d decided he shouldn’t appear too
eager, or be too quick and facile when it came to proclaiming sentiments and
intentions consonant with their own. As Jarla had recounted it, he’d pushed too
hard before, and thus aroused her suspicions. “Anyway, it was just good luck
that I escaped. Afterwards, I hid on the outskirts of the fief to see what would
happen next. The witch hunters burned innocent folk and the houses, barns and
fields of the survivors, just as I told Jarla. Once it became clear how it was
all going to end, I fancied my neighbours might rise up in anger. If they had, I
would have joined them. But they didn’t. They surely recognised the injustice,
but they were too afraid. Afraid of the hunters and the gods they claim to
serve.”
    “They do,” Adolph said, “and that’s how we know Sigmar and
his kind are gods of cruelty and oppression. Fortunately, they aren’t the only
powers to whom a man can pray.”
    Dieter nodded. “The things you’re saying… they’re the same
kinds of things I started thinking after I had to run away, and the village
died. The witch hunters had already condemned me for a servant of the Dark Gods.
Maybe it was what I really ought to be. All of a sudden, tearing down the Empire
and building something new in its place didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
    “So I came to Altdorf,” he continued, “partly just in the
hope of losing myself among the crowds, but also imagining that maybe I could
find people who felt the way I’d come to feel.” He grinned. “Looking back, I
don’t know why I thought I could find them, but you have to understand that out
in the country, we rustics like to imagine big cities ire rife with all manner
of sin and wickedness, forbidden worship included.”
    “Our lord led you to us,” said Jarla, her eyes shining.
Adolph grunted.
    “Maybe so,” Dieter said. “But where exactly has he led me?
Who are you people? A Chaos cult, I understand that much, but what does it
really mean?”
    “It means,” Mama Solveig