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The Last Man – C L Werner

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The Last Man

C L Werner

The streets of Wartenhof were a foul mire of mud and icy slush, desolate and deserted. Shuttered windows faced the troop marching through the town, the door of each hovel locked and barred. The soldiers of the Nachtsheer, calloused veterans long in the employ of the tyrannical Voivode Malbork von Drak, took a sardonic pleasure in the fright they evoked in the peasants. To them these people were little more than dumb animals, creatures to be subjugated. Mercenaries from realms as distant as Nordland and Solland, they felt neither kinship nor pity for the people of Sylvania. It was why Count von Drak employed them. Foreign troops wouldn’t balk at any atrocity that was asked of them.

The lean, russet-cloaked man who accompanied the black-garbed Nachtsheer almost wished he could share the mercenaries’ callous disregard for the denizens of Wartenhof. It was well enough for the soldiers to sneer at the fears of peasants, at the impotent hostility that shone in people’s eyes when they saw them approach. For them, the town was simply another posting, a place that would be left behind and forgotten when the crisis was over and new orders were issued to them. They didn’t call this place home.

For Vincent Rabe, it was different. He’d spent all his life around Wartenhof. As far back as could be remembered, his family had lived in the town. His father had been a forester in the service of the ruling cneaz and his father before him. Vincent was the fifth Rabe to hold the posting, acting as steward of Cneaz Vaclav Rezachevici’s extensive holdings. It was a position of honour and respect, even if it made him the sworn adversary of every poacher in the district. The resentment of poachers, however, was something he could accept. The scorn of his neighbours was something different.

A bitter smile crept onto Vincent’s lean features as his gaze strayed to the cross chalked across the door of a nearby hut. Every day there were fewer neighbours to despise him for colluding with the Nachtsheer, and fewer ears to listen to his protests that he’d been seconded to the brutal mercenaries by order of Cneaz Vaclav.

‘Quiet as a tomb,’ one of the Nachtsheer cursed, spitting into the slush of ice beneath his feet.

‘Keep it that way,’ snarled the commander of the squad, a burly Ostlander named Andreas. The soldier’s hair was parted by a livid white scar, the legacy of a boyhood encounter with a goblin’s knife. A collection of leathery green ears hung from his belt, a silent testament that he’d revenged the injury many times.

Vincent could tell from Andreas’s voice that the soldier was uneasy. It didn’t take any great stretch of imagination to understand why. Plague was abroad in Wartenhof. Normally, the Nachtsheer would simply cordon off an infected community and let it starve. Here, however, because of the strategic location of the town and the influence of Cneaz Vaclav in Drakenhof, the mercenaries had been compelled to take a more intimate interest in the town’s fate. A renegade priest, a madman calling himself Vanhal, was inciting rebellion in the west. The von Draks intended to use Wartenhof as a staging area for their campaign against the rebels once the spring thaw came. For that they needed a living town, not a dead one.

Andreas scowled at the buildings lining the street. His hand brushed against the tangle of dried goblin ears as he removed a strip of leather from beneath his belt. He glimpsed at the crude map of the town inked into it. Looking back at his troops, he jabbed a finger at one of the huts. The mercenaries shied when they saw the cross marked on the door – the warning that plague had visited the household. The Ostlander repeated his gesture, this time with a surly growl.

Accustomed to serving as gaolers for doomed villages, the Nachtsheer were having a difficult time accepting their new role as corpse-collectors. It took armed warriors to enforce the voivode’s edict demanding that the dead be burned as soon as they were discovered. The serfs of Sylvania were prepared to endure much from their noble lords, but denying their dead the dignity of resting in the gardens of Morr was going too far. Several soldiers had been wounded trying to take corpses away to be burned in the plague pit outside the town. In their sorrow, even the most docile serf might become a raging lion.

‘You’re sure?’ Andreas’s question was directed at Vincent. His men were still reluctant to approach the door, each soldier’s face turned to the forester with an expression of anxious hope.

Vincent sighed. Even among his new comrades, he had no friends. With a nod, he crushed their hope. ‘It has been three days since Mircea and his wife were last seen by anyone. When I knocked on their door this morning, there was no answer.’

‘Break it in,’ Andreas ordered his men. The mercenaries glared sullenly at Vincent, but carried out the command. It took only a single kick to smash in the wooden door. Hands closed about the grips of their swords, the soldiers swarmed into the little hut.

What they found sent gasps of alarm and horror ringing out in the street. Vincent hurried into the building with Andreas to see what had provoked such shock, and sickened at the grisly sight. Once again, the Nachtsheer had the advantage over the forester. They didn’t know the actors in the ghastly tableau set before them. They couldn’t put names to the gore-spattered faces that were turned towards them. Neither did they recognise the chewed wreckage strewn across the floor as belonging to a friend and neighbour.

Plague had decimated Wartenhof, but to this had been added an even worse calamity: hunger. The sinister starfall that had rained foul rocks down upon the Sylvanian countryside was an even greater bane to the town. Fields had been flattened by the noxious star-stones, the soil poisoned by their foul vapours. Crops had withered and livestock sickened. An already poor harvest had been ravaged by this ill sending, reducing the ability to sustain the town much less the regiment of Nachtsheer.

It was small surprise, then, that such food as the town was able to gather went to Cneaz Vaclav and the Nachtsheer. The people were left to fend for themselves, reduced to subsisting on tree bark and cooking the filthy black rats that infested the town. Count von Drak no longer ruled Wartenhof alone. He was forced to share his reign with an even greater tyrant: King Hunger.

The obscene result of perpetual starvation stared at the soldiers from the gloom of the hut. Discovered in the midst of their loathsome repast, the disturbed peasants sprang at the Nachtsheer, brandishing dripping bones and bloodied knives in their gore-streaked hands. Viciously, the mercenaries struck out against the corpse-eaters, cutting them down with their slashing swords.

Vincent watched the scene unfold, unable to reconcile his memories of the people he had known all his life with the degenerate cannibals being killed before his eyes. As though he were moving through some awful dream, he drew the heavy axe from his belt and defended himself as a blood-spattered thing that had once been a swine-herd named Dumitru came leaping at him with a cleaver. His axe caught the cannibal in the midsection, opening his belly and knocking the howling wretch to the floor.

Andreas stabbed the point of his sword into Dumitru’s throat, silencing the dying man’s howls. Grimly, the Ostlander wiped his blade clean on the dead man’s goatskin boots. There was a look of disgust on his face as he gazed over the carnage his men had witnessed. ‘Take them all to the pit,’ he ordered and started to turn away.

The motion was arrested in mid-step. Andreas’s face paled until it was the same lifeless shade as the scar running through his scalp. The other Nachtsheer followed the direction of their commander’s gaze. Vincent’s stomach sickened when he saw the thing that had so horrified these hardened warriors.

Mircea’s gnawed remains were strewn across the floor. The cannibals must have been feeding on the corpse for at least an hour. It was impossible there could be any trace of life in what was left. Yet, before the incredulous eyes of soldier and forester alike, that human detritus was moving! With abnormal, abominable vitality, it was struggling to lift itself from the floor with the stump of arm still clinging to its shoulder. Its mouth flopped open and closed like a gasping fish. Its eyes rolled about in the pits of its face, staring balefully at the men gawking at it.

It didn’t take an order from Andreas to send the soldiers scurrying out into the street. Soon the structure was in flames, put to the torch by one of his men.

As they watched flames engulf the hut and the horror inside, the Nachtsheer felt relief. Vincent wished he could take comfort in the destruction, but it was impossible. The soldiers didn’t have to live here. They didn’t have to wonder about what they had seen. It was enough for them to simply destroy it.

Vincent Rabe didn’t have that luxury.

‘It is better not to ask why.’

Those words of wisdom came to Vincent from one of the few men in Wartenhof he could still count as a friend. Though by rights there should have been nothing but bitter enmity between Cneaz Vaclav’s forester and Wartenhof’s most capable poacher. Vincent’s father had never been able to catch Szalardy Dozsa and the son had fared as poorly as his predecessor. Out of their antagonistic relationship a strange kind of mutual respect had grown. It was still Vincent’s duty to catch Szalardy and of course it was the poacher’s job to avoid getting caught, but that didn’t mean the two men couldn’t feel a professional admiration for each other.

Vincent shook his head and sipped at the cup of watery beer his host had provided him when he’d come to Szalardy’s hut and started to relate the harrowing experience of that afternoon. ‘I can’t let it go,’ he said. ‘I have to wonder why the gods could allow such… such horror.’

Szalardy paced about the simply furnished room, the nimble fingers of his hands folded across his emaciated belly. ‘Hungry men don’t ask. They take,’ the poacher replied philosophically.

‘That isn’t what… It’s the other… That thing, that dead thing trying to move, trying to live again.’

‘Even the priests don’t know the ways of the gods,’ Szalardy stated. He forced a laugh to his lips. ‘I’ve spent most of my life amusing Ranald and I’m still never sure if the Trickster God is going to steer me away from one of your traps!’

Szalardy saw that his attempt at levity had no effect. It was a decidedly more dour man who seated himself on the stool facing Vincent. ‘You’ve heard what they are saying? The stories about Vanhal? That he is a necromancer, and wherever he goes he calls the dead from their graves?’ The laugh that he now uttered was thin and bitter. ‘Would a mere man dare defy the Von Draks?’

Vincent stared at his friend. ‘But why? Why would anyone evoke such terrible forces?’

The poacher shrugged. ‘He’s evil,’ he answered simply. ‘Or he’s mad. Maybe both.’ His expression became grave and he glanced across the hut, looking at a section of the floor. ‘Maybe he lost someone, someone he would do anything to get back.’

The forester repressed a shudder as he heard the mournful pain in his friend’s voice. Szalardy had lost both his sons and his wife when the plague struck Wartenhof. Except for his aged mother, the poacher had no family left to him.

‘One more hour,’ Szalardy said. ‘One more day. Wouldn’t that be worth anything?’

Vincent rose from his stool, every muscle in his body tense. Few men would have heard that slight scratching sound, but Vincent’s hearing had been sharpened by a life spent in the wilderness. His ears were acute enough to pick up that furtive scratching – a scratching he knew wasn’t the work of rat claws.

Szalardy grabbed his friend’s arm as he started to move towards the sound. ‘Please,’ he asked. ‘Leave her for me. She’s all I have.’

Horror pounded in Vincent’s heart as he pulled away and rushed across the room. For a moment he hesitated, staring at the floor. How often had he searched for Szalardy’s hiding place, that secret spot where he cached the furs from his traps? Now he knew he had found it.

He wished he hadn’t.

Szalardy didn’t move to stop him as Vincent’s fingers closed about the edge of the concealed door sunk into the floor. The poacher watched in silence as the forester exposed his hiding place and the thing which was its only occupant.

Scrawny, pallid arms reached up at Vincent as he threw open the door. He could see the blotchy marks of the plague that discoloured the decayed flesh and smelled the stink of the disease even over the funk of rot. There was no question of how Szalardy’s mother had died.

‘The one you saw wasn’t the first,’ Szalardy said, his voice soft and resigned. ‘There have been others. Some think it is Morr’s punishment because of the cannibals, others say it is Vanhal’s sorcery reaching out to claim Wartenhof. A few think it is the poison from the starfall.’ The poacher rose to his feet and faced his friend. ‘I don’t care what it is. It’s given me back my mother.’

There was a dagger in Szalardy’s hand as he approached Vincent. Cautiously, the forester backed away from his friend and the hole where the corpse of his dead mother scratched and clawed.

‘Szalardy…’ Vincent called to the poacher in a soft, placating tone. He continued to back away, careful to avoid the gaping hole. ‘This… It… Can’t you see the horror of it?’

The poacher paused, his eyes misty as he considered his friend’s question. ‘Yes. Oh, yes. I know the horror. Haven’t I lived with it these many weeks?’ He looked down at the dagger in his hand, the blade he had used so often to flense the hide from a trapped rabbit. He glanced back at Vincent. ‘Horror is all that is left now.’

‘Please, Szalardy, try to be sane,’ Vincent pleaded.

A sad smile formed on the poacher’s face. ‘We were friends, weren’t we?’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘All these years and you never caught me. Now you have something Cneaz Vaclav will be happy to hear.’

‘He doesn’t need to know anything,’ Vincent said. ‘No one need know of this, but we cannot… That thing down there isn’t your mother any more.’

Szalardy shook his head. ‘I think you would lie for me,’ he told Vincent. ‘Do they hang men who harbour monsters, or do you burn for such a crime? I wouldn’t let you take such a risk.’ The dagger fell to the floor as he strode towards the hole.

‘Besides, it still looks like mother.’

Vincent moved to stop Szalardy, but he was too late. Like a plummet, the unarmed poacher dropped down into the cellar and the waiting talons of the undead thing below. As he fled the hut, Vincent thought his friend’s screams would never stop ringing in his ears.

Before the next bell tolled, he returned with Andreas and a Nachtsheer patrol. Szalardy’s hut and the decayed monster beneath it were put to the torch. A macabre pyre for the man who’d refused to accept the cruelty of King Death.

The scene at Szalardy’s was repeated many times in the days that followed. The plague wasn’t through with Wartenhof and as quickly as the Nachtsheer quarantined one hovel the disease would pop up somewhere else. Even burning the structures did nothing to halt the corruption. Corpse carts trawled the streets twice a day, the dead heaped like cordwood as they bore their diseased cargo to the flames of the plague pit. Still, there were many bodies that went unburied: those with none to care if they went undiscovered and those with relations who cared only too much. Several times the Nachtsheer had uncovered some hidden attic or sealed room where families had concealed their dead, too horrified by the ghastliness of the plague pit to give up their beloved.

Such scenes were made still more horrible when the corpses shambled from their concealment, animated by some obscene semblance of vitality. With rotten fingers and clawed hands, the undead struck out at the living, even those who had loved them so dearly in life. Vincent had been there when a woman had been clawed apart by the rotten husks of her own children, and had watched as the shrivelled shell of an old man bit through the throat of his own son.

Day in, day out, there was no refuge from the horror that had descended upon Wartenhof. One by one, the men of the Nachtsheer began to drop away. Some deserted, deciding that even gold wasn’t adequate compensation for what was asked of them. Some were killed by the crazy and the desperate, mobbed by gangs of cannibals or knifed by looters. Many, however, were taken by the plague itself.

Sense of duty bound Vincent to the survivors, at least until providence deserted him. He’d been fortunate to escape the fate that had claimed so many of his comrades. His household wasn’t so fortunate. One morning, his wife Mircalla awoke to discover the stinking black boils of the plague at her throat and on her armpits. The plague had come for her.

Vincent had seen the plague take victims in only a few hours, while with others the flicker of life might linger for days. He knew there was no hope, that those visited by the plague were doomed to die. His obligation to the community was to announce Mircalla’s affliction, to alert the Nachtsheer, to have the white cross chalked upon his door to warn his neighbours away from his hovel.

It was no easy thing, refusing that obligation. It was an onerous weight that pressed down upon Vincent’s body, compelling him to obey the edicts of the voivode and cneaz. Defiance was a thing that had been periodically starved and beaten out of the minds of Sylvania’s peasants. Obedience was something that had become almost instinctive to men of Vincent Rabe’s station.

Yet, as he looked down into his wife’s eyes, he saw the last embers of her love for him shining out from behind the pain that blighted her flesh, and Vincent knew he could never consign her to the horror of the plague pit and its infernal fire. To tell anyone of Mircalla’s sickness would be to condemn her to such a fate. Mustering his courage, denying his duty to Cneaz Vaclav, he determined that his obligation to the woman he loved was greater than anything his noble lord and his peasant neighbours could expect of him.

The forester stayed at his wife’s side throughout the illness, shirking his work with the Nachtsheer. There was no sense to those hideous excursions through the town. Nothing they did, no matter how ruthless, had any effect on the spread of the plague. It was useless, an empty and fruitless labour. At least by staying with Mircalla, Vincent might ease her suffering, ensuring that she didn’t slip away into Morr’s keeping alone and unlamented.

Day and night, Vincent maintained his vigil. His senses became inured to the sick-room reek and blind to the horror of the sores and boils. It was harder to deafen himself to Mircalla’s pained gasps. Sometimes he would berate himself for being selfish, for greedily trying to possess every last moment of life she had left. Sometimes he would hear her cry out and wonder if he should do something to speed her passing. Then he would look down into her eyes and see that same light in her eyes. Even at the price of such pain, she was determined to have every last moment she could with him.

When the end finally came, Vincent tried to deny it. For long hours, he continued to hold Mircalla’s hand, feeling the last warmth drain out of the lifeless flesh. It was only when he heard someone pounding at the door of his hovel that he finally stirred from beside her deathbed.

Vincent felt his heart turn cold with fear as he opened the door. In the midst of his despair over Mircalla, he’d been too distraught to worry about the consequences of his grief. Now, the forester had a very vivid reminder of the obligations he’d cast aside. Standing outside his hovel, draped in armour as black as night itself, was the Nachtsheer sergeant, Andreas.

The soldier’s expression was stern as he stared down at Vincent. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, ready to rip it from its scabbard on the slightest provocation. Andreas wrinkled his nose as the sick-house stink of Vincent’s hovel drifted out into the street. It was a stench the Ostlander had smelled many times before, a diseased reek he couldn’t fail to recognise.

Vincent braced himself, certain that his duplicity had been discovered. In that moment, his only regret was the knowledge that Mircalla’s body would be carted away to the fires of the plague pit. That he would suffer the same fate, possibly without the mercy of being dead first, seemed almost trivial to him beside the horrible image of the flames consuming his wife’s cold flesh.

For an instant Andreas glowered at him, then the soldier’s grip on his sword relaxed. ‘The Nachtsheer has missed you these past five days,’ Andreas said, his voice a low growl.

‘Five days?’ Vincent blinked. Somehow it didn’t seem that it had taken so long for Mircalla to die.

‘I’ve come to tell you that your services will no longer be needed,’ Andreas continued. ‘You are released.’

Again, Vincent felt confused by the soldier’s words. ‘Cneaz Vaclav needs me to guide the Nachtsheer,’ he said, though his tone lacked the display of emotion that might make the statement a protest.

‘Cneaz Vaclav needs no one now,’ Andreas said. ‘The plague took him last night.’ His face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Even if it hadn’t, there is no one left to carry out his orders. My men are either dead or deserted. I knew when I was sent here that Wartenhof would be the end of us.’

He reached up, pulling away the scarf wrapped about his neck. Vincent recoiled when he saw the black marks on Andreas’s throat.

‘When?’ was all Vincent could think to say.

‘Yesterday,’ the soldier answered. ‘Almost the same time the cneaz was drawing his last breath.’ Andreas stiffened, turned a haunted face to the forester. ‘I will be staying at the tavern. When the pain gets too great I have a good knife of Nordland steel. My passing will go easier if you will make a promise to me.’

‘If it is in my power.’

Andreas nodded, accepting Vincent’s tenuous commitment. ‘I want you to take my corpse to the pit. Burn me. Better the fire than…’ He waved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘They come back, you know. Not just some of them like in the beginning. All of them. Things from a nightmare. The undead.’ Suddenly his hand was clenched tight about Vincent’s shoulder. ‘I won’t come back like that. Put me in the fire! Promise me!’

Vincent twisted under the soldier’s grip, his body shuddering in revulsion. Somehow the same man who had held the diseased fingers of Mircalla for days now cringed from the infected touch of Andreas. Fear is never the slave of logic.

‘I will. I will!’ Vincent vowed, squirming free from Andreas. The scarred Ostlander stepped away from the door, ostentatiously replacing the scarf around his neck.

‘The tavern,’ he reminded Vincent. Andreas pointed at the room behind the forester. ‘If she’s gone already, you’d better burn her too,’ he warned. He frowned when he saw Vincent shake his head. ‘She’ll come back if you don’t. But it won’t be your wife; it’ll be some monster wearing her flesh.’

‘Thank you for your advice,’ Vincent said, his voice cold as a razor.

Andreas shrugged. ‘Don’t get yourself killed until you’ve burned my corpse,’ he said. ‘The tavern. Don’t forget.’

Vincent did forget. There were so many other things that occupied him in the days afterward that a promise extracted from him by a man he had feared and hated was far from his foremost thoughts.

Wartenhof was dying. There was no one to gather the bodies, to mark the places of infection, to toll the bell in the shrine of Morr and no one to usher the spirits of the dead into the netherworld. In the first days, the wailing of the bereaved, the moans of the afflicted were the only sounds rising from the stricken town. When Vincent stirred from his hovel in search of food, there was no one on the streets, only the stray dogs who nibbled at the unburied corpses scattered about. At first the curs were timid and easily frightened away, but with each day the mongrels became bolder. Where they had once retreated from the forester, they now stood their ground, snapping and snarling with bared fangs as they crouched over their hideous fodder.

Food was scarce before the plague, but now it took only a little searching to find enough to sustain himself. Every hovel and hut had its hidden cache of grain and seed, secreted away in defiance of Cneaz Vaclav and his decrees. Though never enough to feed an entire household through the winter, it was more than sufficient to sustain a single man.

Rarely did Vincent encounter anyone on these scavenging expeditions. But there were times and experiences that Vincent knew he could never forget.

The wattle-and-daub hovel that belonged to Petru, one of Wartenhof’s farmers, seemed to Vincent like any of the other abandoned structures. He couldn’t say when Petru had been taken, though he did remember visiting the place with the Nachtsheer to collect the body of his son. The white cross was chalked up on the door which swung open in the wind. Vincent knew that with the wild dogs prowling the streets, no inhabited building would leave its door unbarred. With this wisdom in hand, he descended upon the hut to see if Petru had left anything behind.

As he stole through the open door, Vincent came within an inch of losing his life. From the darkness there was a flash of steel. The forester darted back as sharpened metal whistled past his face. His hand fell to the grip of his hatchet, a tool that had served him well against marauding wolves and panthers.

It was, of course, no such animal that wielded cold steel. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw his attacker standing defiantly in the centre of the room, shoulders hunched, hand locked about the splintered grip of a meat cleaver. There was a feral, vicious gleam in the eyes that glared at Vincent. Even a starving wolf had never looked so bestial to the forester.

The hideous situation was compounded by Vincent’s recognition of the man. He was, or had been, a swineherd named Razvan. Even as he stared at the half-crazed savage, it was hard for him to credit the evidence of his eyes. Razvan had been an exuberant, cheerful neighbour. How many times had Vincent watched children clustered about him in the town square, listening with fascination as he regaled them with some old Fennone legend or some new fable of his own concoction? How often had he swapped lies with the man over mugs of ale in Lucian’s tavern?

There was no recognition in Razvan’s fierce stare, only violent challenge. Keeping a grip on the hatchet tucked in his belt, Vincent retreated back into the street, content to leave the madman to whatever plunder he’d found. The lesson, however, wasn’t lost on the forester. Before entering another structure, he would check the earth around it for signs of life. Never again would he assume a place unoccupied, no matter how desolate and forlorn.

And he would start bearing a sword as well as a hatchet.

Prowling through the shambles that had been Ghenadie’s mercantile, Vincent again found himself far from alone. There had been tracks outside the big half-timber building – as soon as the threat of Nachtsheer patrols was gone those who still lived in Wartenhof had descended upon the mercantile to steal supplies. The looters were gone, however – they had fled the town or else succumbed to the plague themselves. The only trace of them beyond their tracks was the corpse of a farmer with half his head caved-in; a victim of some disagreement among the vultures.

Vincent didn’t have much hope that the scavengers had left anything, but there was always the chance that they might have overlooked something. It transpired that they had.

In one of the rooms of the mercantile’s upper floor, Vincent discovered the pale, wasted frame of Tereza. Even a few weeks ago, Ghenadie’s wife had been the beauty of Wartenhof. Now it was an emaciated, near lifeless thing that lay stretched upon the enormous fur-trimmed bed. Vincent wouldn’t have recognised her except for the emerald band around her finger and her long golden hair. He wouldn’t have realised she was still alive if not for the trembling hand that rose from the bed and pointed at him.

There was too much desperate emotion in that gesture for Vincent to confuse it with the vacant, horrible action of the undead. When he looked at Tereza’s face, there was entreaty in her eyes, not the ghastly emptiness of a zombie.

He started to approach her, but the woman gave a violent shake of her hand, warning him back. He could see the splotches blemishing her delicate skin. She warned him back and when he had retreated a few paces, she made a stabbing motion with her finger. When Vincent gave her a questioning look, she repeated the gesture, raising her sickly body from the pillows as she jabbed her finger at the wall behind him.

Meekly, Vincent turned and tried to see what the sick woman was pointing to. After a moment’s confusion, he drew aside the heavy tapestry fastened to the wall. Tereza’s pointing hand became more emphatic, waving him towards the floor. He crouched down, almost flattening himself along the boards. Even with his nose a few inches from the wall he would have missed the hidden catch without Tereza’s guidance. A deft turn of the almost invisible hook and a secret panel opened in the wall.

From the sickbed, Tereza uttered a relieved gasp. Vincent looked back to see her slump back in the pillows, her arm dropping and dangling limply along the side of the bed. The relieved gasp collapsed into a death rattle, the woman finally conceding her long fight against the plague. It seemed she had lingered only to impart the knowledge of Ghenadie’s secret hiding place. With the task done there was nothing left to hold her to the mortal plane.

Vincent reached into the hiding place, dragging out a large bronze coffer. It took three blows from his hatchet to smash open the lock. When he did, and when he let his eyes fall onto the contents of the coffer, a bitter laugh rose from his throat.

The coffer was filled with coins. Gold and silver, the treasure of Ghenadie skimmed from the produce of Wartenhof, stolen before it could reach the hands of Cneaz Vaclav. It was more wealth than any man in the town could have hoped to see, enough to buy Wartenhof ten times over. Ghenadie must have spent decades amassing such a fortune without alerting Vaclav to his larceny. But, then, Ghenadie had been a crafty man well suited to sharp dealings and daring ventures.

Vincent ran his hand through the coins, feeling their weight as they poured through his fingers. He glanced back at the bed and the plague-marked corpse of Tereza. Treasure hadn’t helped her or her husband. Death was a force that respected neither wealth nor breeding. Death struck down rich and poor, noble and peasant, with equal disdain. There was no bribing the heralds of Morr, no paying away the claws of plague.

The forester left the coffer where it lay. Gold and silver! These were useless things. Could a man eat them? Could a man burn them for heat? Could he drink them? Vincent would have happily traded the entire coffer for a few ounces of venison and a bag of beans.

As he left the mercantile, Vincent wondered if some other scavenger would find the treasure. Perhaps some soul would use the money to escape Wartenhof and buy his way to a land where the plague was unknown. He wished such an adventurer the grace of Shallya and the luck of Ranald.

He wished he could escape Wartenhof, but he knew he could never leave the town. The ties that bound him to his home were too terrible to escape.

Two days after she died, Mircalla’s body stirred. The obscene echo of life poured back into her, causing her eyes to open, her mouth to move, her muscles to flex. Vincent had waited beside her deathbed to see if his wife would share the monstrous fate that had stolen upon so many of Wartenhof’s dead. He thought he had prepared himself for such a ghastly eventuality, but when it came he could only shudder and cringe in terror.

He almost died then. Vincent appreciated that fact even as he cowered against the wall of his hovel, unable to do anything but gawk at Mircalla’s ghoulish resurrection. Dead hands groped towards him with clawed fingers, jaws snapped in grisly menace. Had she been able, Mircalla would have killed him and he would have been helpless to stop her.

Foresight saved Vincent. Before the unclean simulacrum of life settled into his wife’s corpse, he’d taken the precaution of lashing her down to the bed. As he took the precaution, he’d tried to tell himself it wasn’t needed, that Mircalla would remain at peace. He would justify his decision to spare her the fires of the plague pit.

It was a long time before Vincent was able to rouse himself from his grief and horror, to tear his eyes away from the thing thrashing about in its bindings. He reached for the hatchet at his belt. How many times had he played the scene out in his fears? The undead husk of Mircalla and the abominable duty he must perform!

His fingers tightened about the hatchet and he moved away from the wall and approached the bed. As he raised the axe to bring the blade chopping down into the prisoned thing, Vincent’s resolve faltered. For all the horror of it, for all his understanding that what was tied down on the bed wasn’t his wife, it still looked like her. It was her flesh it wore. What if he were wrong, what if there were some remnant of her identity locked away inside that dead flesh?

Stricken with doubt, Vincent let the hatchet fall to the floor. He retreated from the bound zombie, escaping out into the silent streets of Wartenhof. Later, perhaps, he would have the strength to return, to do what he knew he must do, but for now he could only flee. He would find some other place to give him shelter, some refuge away from the empty eyes of the woman he had loved.

It was dark when Vincent abandoned his home to the ghastly echo of his wife. The image of Mircalla staring at him with that lifeless gaze, the sound of her thrashing in her bonds, these were memories that tortured him anew with each step he took, a physical agony that turned his blood cold and his stomach sick. He felt that he must scream or go mad.

He had actually stopped in the middle of the street, had started to sob when some sixth sense warned him to be silent. Instinctively, Vincent turned to the source of his unease. At first it was difficult to make out the shape in the shadow of a peasant hut. When he did, he wished the sight had remained indistinct. What he saw was a feral dog and the corpse of a plague victim. The corpse was horrible with the marks of the disease, made still more hideous by the depredation wrought by the dog. Great bites disfigured its limbs; its left cheek was a twist of gnawed flesh, its belly eaten out clear down to the spine.

Yet for all the damage inflicted upon it, the corpse moved! It raked its decayed hands through the gory mush of the slaughter dog, mindlessly strewing the street with the animal’s organs. There was a terrifying deliberation in the zombie’s savagery, a thoroughness of hate that needed no mentality to guide it. The unreasoning enmity of the dead for the living.

For a moment, Vincent hesitated, lost in the horror of what he was seeing. Then he felt himself gripped by a profound loathing – a disgust for this ravening abomination. Was it not enough that the plague had decimated Wartenhof? Must the town suffer the further misery of these loathsome fiends?

Snarling the names of Taal and Rhya, the gods of forest and meadow, Vincent drew the sword from his belt and rushed at the zombie. The creature was just turning away from its dismemberment of the dog when the cold steel slashed across its neck. The mushy flesh parted almost to the bone, leaving the head to flop obscenely against its shoulder, dangling by a flap of skin.

Vincent called upon his gods again as the mutilated zombie staggered towards him. A second chopping blow sent the rotten head rolling along the ground and the corrupt body pitched over, its vile vitality extinguished.

The forester gazed upon the twice-slain corpse, feeling his fury mounting with each breath he drew into his body. Again and again he brought his sword down into the rank flesh, butchering the zombie beyond anything recognisably human. With each blow, Vincent thought of Mircalla tied down to the bed, his Mircalla, who was now a thing such as this. As he hacked apart the undead, he tried to ignore the shame buried inside him, guilt that he wasn’t strong enough to do the same for his wife.

Panting from his exertion, his clothes stained with the decayed filth from the zombie’s rotten veins, Vincent recoiled from the carcass, disgusted not only at the corrupt nature of the thing he had destroyed, but also at his own bestial viciousness. He thought of Razvan, the cheerful storyteller who had descended to a state of brute madness. Was that same horrible gleam in his eye now? Did his face curl into that mask of primitive savagery? With a cry of revulsion he fled from the zombie he had destroyed. His retreat was a futile effort. It wasn’t the monster in the street he feared, but the one that might be growing inside his own mind.

As his new home, Vincent selected the ostentatious apartment of Wartenhof’s only moneylender – a man who’d fled the town long ago to seek the supposed safety of Drakenhof itself. Behind him he’d been forced to leave rich furnishings and opulent accoutrements that even Cneaz Vaclav might have envied.

The richness of his new refuge proved a most insidious trap. That was something he’d discovered the third night he spent in the place.

Trying to sleep in the richly upholstered bed, Vincent was gripped by uneasiness. It was the same sort of nebulous anxiety that he’d felt many times in the forest when the panther or wolf he’d been tracking turned about and began stalking him instead. Despite the precautions he’d taken to secure the doors and windows, he felt a nagging sense of impending danger. Something he’d overlooked. Something he’d forgotten.

Unable to sleep, Vincent finally rose from the bed. The moneylender’s townhouse had been built on two floors, private chambers above with utilitarian rooms such as the kitchen and study below. Just as he approached the stairs, his sharp ears caught the creak of a wooden step. Like a statue, he froze – every sense alert for another sound. He didn’t have long to wait before the creak was repeated. Somewhere in the darkness below, someone or something was mounting the stairs!

Vincent drew the sword from his belt, eyes straining to penetrate the shadows. His heart pounded in his chest. Vainly he tried to reason away the dread clawing at him. Perhaps the rats were back, scampering about in the dark. Perhaps it was another survivor he heard, come to loot the moneylender’s vault.

Vault! Nausea welled up inside the forester as he recognised the worry that had been nagging at him, the sense of omission that refused to let him feel secure. When he’d made his inspection of the building and fortified it against invasion from outside, he’d neglected to check one place – the cellar underneath the larder.

The forester backed away from the stairs as his mind made other terrible connections. The moneylender had fled Wartenhof and left most of his possessions behind, yet there was no cross mark upon his door to indicate the plague had visited his household. Had some miracle preserved his home when all around him was afflicted, or had he simply hidden the fact from his neighbours? The moneylender’s household had been large, a big family and many servants. How many of them had felt the touch of plague? How many of them had he left behind, or hidden away in the cellar like Szalardy’s mother?

A beam of moonlight streamed down through a hole in the roof, bathing the stairway in silvery light. Every muscle in Vincent’s body began to tremble when he saw the silent procession stalking up those steps towards him. The moneylender had apparently left a very large household behind. Some of the advancing zombies looked so corrupt and decayed that they must have been weeks rotting down there in the darkness. The fresher ones were even more gruesome, their decayed flesh marred with the marks of nails and teeth. The horrible inference struck Vincent like a physical blow – when the moneylender abandoned Wartenhof, he had cast his still-living servants into the cellar to be slaughtered by the undead!

The foremost zombie was almost upon Vincent before his shrinking mind recovered its focus. With a cry of anguish, he brought his sword slashing into the decayed monster, breaking ribs and leaving bloated organs to spill from its torn flesh. The creature staggered back, upsetting the approach of the zombies behind it. For an instant, the forester hesitated, debating whether he should defend the ground he held.

The sight of the zombie he had struck, the rotten corpse with its dripping organs and shattered ribs lurching back towards him – it was this that made the courage of a man who had once hunted a crazed bear by himself buckle and break. With abject terror, Vincent turned and fled, retreating into the opulent chamber he had thought to claim as his own. Gasping for breath, shivering from crown to toe, he slammed the door shut and dropped the beam across it.

He was still leaning against the door when he heard the zombies staggering down the hall. His hands were pressed down upon the beam, trying to hold it in place when he felt the impact of rotten fists against the panel. The door shuddered ever so slightly under the impact. Then other fists were added to the assault and the commotion became more pronounced. Like blows from a hammer, the fists struck again and again, battering away at the barrier.

Tireless and remorseless, the zombies maintained their attack on the door. Vincent could feel the tremor of the repeated blows, which made the hinges shudder and the hard wood panels splinter. How long would the barrier hold? How long before it collapsed and left him helpless before the undead horde?

Vincent glanced over the room. There was no window, no connecting door. He was like a hare trapped in a box, waiting for the poacher to lift the lid and drag him out to be butchered.

A grim smile flickered on the forester’s face and he lifted his gaze upwards. There was a way out! But would there be time enough to take it?

Reluctantly, Vincent pushed himself away from the door, going sick as he watched the way the bar shuddered in its frame without his weight to reinforce it. There was no help for it; he had to trust that it would hold, that it would defy the zombies long enough for him to escape. Forcing himself to turn his back to the trembling door, he leapt onto the bed. Stretching, he brought his sword stabbing into the ceiling. Desperately he hacked away at the weave of thatch that formed the roof.

Progress was agonisingly slow, the thatch resisting his efforts with a stubbornness that seemed deliberate. The sound of the door rattling on its hinges, the pounding drum of undead fists against wooden panels, these boomed in his ears like the roar of thunder. It was all he could do to keep from turning away from his task, to stare at the shuddering portal. He knew that he dare not give in to such a compulsion. He didn’t need to know. Either he would force a hole through the ceiling or he would die. There was no help in knowing how long he had left before one or the other came to be.

Vincent uttered a jubilant bark of triumph as moonlight streamed into the room through the hole he had finally gouged through the thick layers of thatch. His victory crumbled as a new noise crackled from the door. It was the sound of splintering wood. The zombies were starting to break down the door.

Frenziedly, the forester attacked the ceiling, raw terror burning through his veins. Bit by bit, the hole began to widen enough to allow a small child to press through. Vincent shook his head. Too slow, it was all coming too slow!

With a ghastly din, the brutalized door sagged into the room, its upper hinges torn away from their fastenings. The undead clawed and fumbled in the resultant gap, mindlessly trying to force their way in despite the obstacle presented by the lower half of the door, oblivious to the long splinters of wood embedded in their decayed hands.

Vincent took one horrified look at the doorway. Under the weight of the zombies, he knew the remaining hinges would soon give way and the bar would soon buckle. He had only a matter of moments before the undead were inside and their cold talons ripped the life from his flesh.

Thrusting the sword back into his belt, Vincent jumped from the top of the bed, flinging himself into the hole he’d made. Head and shoulders thrust up into the cold Sylvanian night, hands scrambled at the surface of the roof before his own weight dragged him back down. From below, he heard the door at last give way. Frantically he fought to pull himself through the close-fitting hole and force his body through the cramped space.

For a moment, he was caught, and then he felt something grabbing at his feet. Flailing wildly, sobbing in horror, Vincent exerted muscles he didn’t even know he had, throwing every scrap of his being into one terrified effort. The thatch scratched him savagely as his body was wrenched upwards and the grip on his boot was broken.

Vincent lay upon the roof for what seemed like many minutes, listening to the zombies shambling about in the room below.

It was nearly dawn before the jitters that wracked him subsided enough that he felt composed enough to stir. Weakened by the violence wrought against it, he was careful lest more of the roof collapse and send him into the waiting claws of the zombies.

Gingerly, the forester crept to the raised centre of the roof where the timber support beam projected. As carefully as he could, he lifted himself onto the beam. Only then, with the hard solidity of the beam beneath him, did he take a moment to appreciate the narrowness of his escape. His understanding of how fortunate he was became magnified when he turned his eyes downward and saw the great mob that had gathered outside the building. Scores of rotting corpses animated by the most unholy magic, all of them drawn by some obscene sense to his refuge, to seek out the little ember of life yet to be extinguished in a town that had become Death.

The desolation of Wartenhof was complete when the rains came. Structures neglected for months began to collapse under the pounding torrent. Thatch roofs, having gone without mending for so long, crumbled down into peasant hovels, leaving only the skeletal beams standing stark against the grey sky. Wattle-and-daub walls cracked and split, strips of plaster fell from half-timber frames. The streets, simple lanes of dirt, became mires of mud and decay.

Even the rains couldn’t blot out the stench of death. The town was ripe with the smell of corpses, an all-pervasive stink that seemed to soak into the very earth. There was no relief from the reek, for it found a way to crawl into even the most firmly shuttered room. Vincent’s nose became adjusted to the offensive odour, growing accustomed to it until at length it became almost unnoticeable. Such familiarity bore with it danger of the most awful sort.

Feral dogs no longer prowled Wartenhof. Even the swarming rats had become a rare sight. The desertion of even these hardy scavengers marked the final abandonment of the town. A force more terrible than even the plague had closed its bony talons about the place. The corpses whose stench pervaded Wartenhof might be unburied, but they weren’t at rest. With shambling, stumbling steps they prowled the town as zombies, snuffing out the flame of life wherever they came upon it.

Vincent had deluded himself in those early days. In his time with the Nachtsheer, the monstrous affliction that caused the dead to rise again was a freak abnormality, but it could never be so widespread as to claim the entire town. He knew better now. It was true that certain bodies reacted more quickly, assuming their new obscene semblance of life more readily than others, but in the end none of Wartenhof’s dead remained at rest. From the vantage of the spire above the abandoned chapel of Shallya, he had even seen half-burned cadavers dragging themselves from the plague pit in the fields beyond the town, crawling on the blackened stumps of arms, their charred skulls blindly staring up into the sky. A ghoulish procession of mutilated undead, bodies the fires had been too weak to incinerate.

The chapel of Shallya – the peasants of Wartenhof had turned their back on the goddess when her power failed to save them from the plague. An angry mob had tried to burn the little temple down but were driven off before their mayhem could go too far, defeated not by the might of the goddess but by the threat of the Nachtsheer. Shallya had failed to protect even her clergy from the plague, why would a simple structure of timber and stone demand her attention?

It was necessity rather than faith that drove Vincent to seek out the chapel. For several days after quitting the moneylender’s house he had crept from one place to another, always trying to avoid the packs of undead that seemed to be everywhere now. The rooftops had become his thoroughfare, leaping from one building to another, cutting holes so that he could drop down inside and search for provisions. Dangerous, these expeditions, but necessary. All too often he found his hunting grounds infested with zombies. Sometimes he would fight the abominations, trying to bring to them a more lasting brand of death. He soon gave up such aspirations. Unless the body was destroyed entirely, the undead simply rose again within a few days. It was simply beyond his resources.

After his experience at the moneylender’s apartment, Vincent despaired of finding shelter that offered both security and openness. He wouldn’t put himself in a little box again, however secure it might seem. If the zombies breeched the defences of his refuge, he wanted a way to escape. For several days his solution had been to sleep on the rooftops, to endure exposure to wind and rain rather than tempt the prowling zombies.

A better solution came to him after observing one of the undead trying to extricate itself from a hog wallow. Despite the little ladder leading up from the swine pit, the zombie was unable to free itself. The coordination to mount a flight of stairs still belonged to them, but not the intelligence to manipulate a simple ladder successfully.

The steeple above Shallya’s chapel could be ascended only by means of a tall ladder adjacent to the vestry. As a further precaution, however, Vincent drew the ladder up behind him when he climbed into the steeple. In the little attic above the chapel he had room enough to store the victuals he’d been able to find, the protection of walls and the shelter of a shingle roof. The open face of the steeple offered easy egress should it be necessary and he fastened a length of rope to facilitate a quick drop to the ground.

Vincent could see all of Wartenhof from his new refuge. It was a sight that made him feel empty inside. In the entire town, he was the only living thing. He’d seen the gnawed remains of Razvan on one of his supply hunts. The crazed scavenger had found adversaries who weren’t intimidated by a meat cleaver.

He was the last man in Wartenhof. For all he knew, he might be the last man in the Empire, in the world. The plague had taken so many and those it left behind seemed doomed to perish in the claws of the undead.

Truly the gods had forsaken mankind. What awful thing he had done to make them spare him when everyone else was taken, Vincent didn’t know. All he knew was that he was alone.

And that was a misery worse than death.

Weeks passed in the ruins of Wartenhof. Vincent’s existence settled into a routine of prowling the desolation, scavenging supplies from the homes of the dead. Whenever he felt strong enough he would return to his old home and spend hours sitting beside Mircalla. By degrees loneliness and isolation made him numb to the ghastliness of her condition. Almost, he could imagine her as she had been. He took to talking to her, relating the events of the intervening days. Deep down inside he knew it was madness, these visits to the mindless husk of his wife. But he also realised that without even this shabby semblance of companionship he would succumb completely.

Hope blossomed one dreary winter day as Vincent was on his way to visit her. Leaping across the rooftops, he noticed something unusual on the ground below. Clinging to a chimney for support, the forester stared down into an alleyway and rubbed his eyes.

No, what he saw was no cruel trick of his eyes. There was a body lying there, the decayed carcass of a zombie. A spear had been thrust through its chest and the top of its skull had been sheared off with a blade. Such violence was beyond the paltry intelligence of the undead. Someone else had done this – a living person.

Desperately, Vincent scurried above the decaying streets. Here and there he would see further evidence that someone had been active in the town – the dispatched carrion of more zombies. Yet as hard as he might he could find no trace of them. Fear whispered inside his brain, setting a terrible doubt at work within him. Perhaps there was no one, perhaps he had assaulted the zombies himself and then, in his madness, forgotten his own actions!

The prospect was too monstrous. Despite the danger, Vincent dropped down to the street and rushed to where one of the zombies lay. His trained eyes studied the ground, his spirit becoming more wretched the harder he looked. He could find no footprints, at least nothing that belonged to anyone alive. There was no mistaking the dragging, clumsy print of the zombies. The only other tracks were those of animals.

Before despair could fully tighten around his heart, Vincent reflected that someone had killed the handful of zombies he had found. He might have missed their tracks, but he couldn’t refute their handiwork. They had to be somewhere, and he would find them!

Climbing back onto the nearest roof, Vincent resumed his search. It wasn’t long before his hunt bore results. From the mercantile’s roof he could see the tavern. The absence of active zombies in the streets was explained. A great mob of the undead had surrounded the tavern, cordoning it off in a ring of decayed flesh. There could be only one reason for such activity, one motivation that could stir the zombies to such effort. There was someone alive inside the tavern.

Hastily Vincent rushed across the roofs, reckless in the hope and urgency that now ruled him. Whoever was inside the tavern was trapped. If they didn’t think to cut an opening in the ceiling, to use the roofs as he had done…

Vincent fought down the horror such a possibility presented. To find someone after all this time only to lose them before he could even hear the sound of their voice! No, it was too abominable! The gods couldn’t be so cruel.

Nearing the tavern, Vincent found the area swarming with the undead. His stomach clenched as he recognised the faces of people he had known amidst the rotten tatters of the zombies. The decayed mob converged upon the timber walls of the building, some residue of mentality drawing them towards the doors and windows. Unfeeling fists pounded against the barricaded portals, relentless in their effort to get inside.

From his perch atop an adjacent roof, Vincent stared down at the zombies. It would take a desperate leap to reach the roof of the tavern; the slightest slip would send him hurtling to the street and the merciless talons of the undead. For an instant he hesitated, tempted to slink away, to leave the men trapped in the tavern to their fate. The awful spectre of loneliness overwhelmed his fear with a still greater terror. The risk of death wasn’t so terrible when life held nothing to make it precious.

Whispering a prayer to Taal, Vincent flung himself from the roof. His hands scrabbled at the wooden shingles as he nearly missed his target. Teeth clenched against the sting of splinters stabbing into his fingers, he fought to keep from slipping, from losing his tenuous grip. For a moment he hung suspended above the rotten ranks of zombies. His blood turned cold when he dared to look down, finding many of the creatures drawn away from their assault on the doors and windows. They were gathered below, reaching up to him with clawed hands, clutching at the feet hanging just beyond their reach. With a moan of horror, he forced the muscles in his arms to a supreme effort, pulling himself up onto the roof and away from the hideous throng below.

Gasping from his exertions and the ghastly death he had so nearly succumbed to, it was several minutes before Vincent was able to stir himself from where he lay among the shingles. It was the sound of splintering wood, the sharp distorted tone of a shriek that was inhuman in its agony, which provided the urgency that roused him to action. Desperate violence characterised his attack on the shingles, ripping them up with the head of his axe until he had gouged a hole in the ceiling of the room below.

Vincent didn’t delay. The moment the hole was wide enough for him to drop into he did so. Urgency didn’t allow him to look first, to exhibit the caution that had kept him alive these many weeks. It was a mistake that nearly cost him everything.

The room below had been a bedchamber, now an abominable stench of decay clung to it bringing tears to Vincent’s eyes. As he tried to blink away the stench, he didn’t see the figure that awkwardly rose from the bed and lurched towards him. The first he was aware of its presence was when tearing fingers gouged into his arm.

Vincent cried out in pain as he felt the talons sink into his flesh. He tried to whirl about, to bring his hatchet chopping down into his attacker. Yet at the last instant, he froze. Even with maggots squirming through the wreckage of its face there was no mistaking the visage of Sergeant Andreas. More horrible, however, was the recognition that flared through the zombie’s eyes, the way its rotten face contorted into a hateful snarl.

Vincent had forgotten the promise Andreas had exacted from him, but even in its obscene condition, the zombie remembered. Remembered and demanded revenge!

Before Vincent could bring the hatchet crashing down, Andreas grabbed his hand and froze the weapon in mid-swing. Now, with both arms immobilised by the zombie, it was all the forester could do to avoid the snapping teeth of his undead foe. He found himself locked in a ghastly dance, shifting and stumbling about in the dark reek of the closed room with the vicious monster clamouring for his death. At every step he could feel his strength ebb, draining away with the blood that flowed from his savaged arm.

Reeling across the room, Vincent stopped trying to writhe free from Andreas’s grip. Instead, mustering such reserves of strength as hadn’t already bled out of him, the forester locked his fingers about the zombie’s rotten flesh, securing his own hold upon the monster. Lunging forward in a fierce charge, he propelled himself and his foe in a drive towards the locked door.

Both man and monster crashed through the panel, splintering the board that had been used to lock the zombie inside. The momentum drove them across the landing and against the balustrade overlooking the hall below. The wood splintered beneath the impact of their bodies as Vincent and Andreas pitched to the floor below. With the zombie beneath him, Vincent was able to force it to bear the brunt of the impact. He heard bones splinter as Andreas smashed into the hard wood floor.

His own condition was little better. Vincent felt something snap in his left leg and screamed as his wrist bent back upon itself as he hit the floor. Rattled and battered, he tried to pull away from the crushed zombie, only to find its loathsome grip as powerful as ever.

Despite receiving the brunt of the violence, Andreas was oblivious to the damage inflicted upon it. The zombie lurched up at Vincent, snapping at him with jaws knocked askew by the fracturing of its skull. The forester cringed away, trying to escape the vindictive glare of the monster’s eyes.

As he pulled the zombie up with him, Vincent shouted, appealing to the survivors barricaded somewhere nearby. If only they would help him and come to his aid before Andreas could deliver his terrible revenge.

The zombie’s rotten breath washed over him as it leaned down to snap at his throat. Desperately Vincent pushed the thing back, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before the indefatigable strength of the undead prevailed against his own reduced vitality.

Suddenly, the zombie stiffened. A spearhead erupted from its chest in a spray of desiccated corruption. Like a bug on a pin, the zombie struggled for a moment before its mangled head was knocked from its shoulders by the slashing sweep of a sword.

He was saved! The survivors had heard his cry. Vincent laughed at the irony. He had come here to save these men, but instead they had saved him.

His laughter was echoed by a shrill, high-pitched chitter. Vincent’s eyes went wide with disbelief as he stared at his rescuer. He’d risked everything to rescue fellow men, but the life sheltering inside the tavern wasn’t remotely human.

An abominable shape that blended the revolting aspects of a huge grotesque rat with some vague suggestion of human shape stood above the corpse of Andreas. Bits of armour and strips of rag swaddled the beast in crude semblance of raiment. In its hand-like paws, the thing held the gory length of a spear and in its beady red eyes there was a profane gleam of mocking intelligence.

Vincent’s shock was so complete that he didn’t even feel the spear when it was thrust into his chest. Even when a second ratman approached with upraised sword to decapitate him, he could scarcely acknowledge what was happening to him. The plague, the zombies, all of them had been horror enough, but to see these things was something else. Truly the gods had abandoned the Empire and condemned the world to madness.

The skaven chittered with vicious amusement as it brought the edge of its sword hacking into Vincent’s neck. The chittering degenerated into an angry snarl when the blade failed to shear through what the ratkin expected would be flesh weakened by rot and worms. It took three strokes to remove the head and claim its trophy. It lifted its prize, sniffing at the unexpected aroma of fresh blood. Renewed squeals of fright from the barricade behind the tavern doors made the swordrat drop Vincent’s head to the floor.

The warriors of Clan Fester were finding it no easy prospect annihilating the zombies that infested the town, but such had been their orders. No ratman defied the commands of Seerlord Skrittar twice! The Seerlord wanted Wartenhof, therefore the town would fall.

Unwittingly, the swordrat had finished part of the conquest, its blade had cleansed Wartenhof of its human presence. Down to the very last man.

About The Author

C L Werner’s Black Library credits include the Space Marine Battles novel The Siege of Castellax, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang, the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy, the Thanquol and Boneripper series and Time of Legends: The Black Plague. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He claims that he was a diseased servant of the Horned Rat long before his first story was ever published.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-597-5

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* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.