A WARHAMMER NOVEL

NECROMANCER

Jonathan Green

(A Flandrel & Undead Scan v1.0)

This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering World’s Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

The Confession of

Brother Matteus

The door to the cell creaked open and Father Ludwik entered the room where the dying went to die. The air in the chamber was thick and heavy with the lingering stench of death. A single, frail candle flame guttered in the sudden gust of chill air, throwing monstrous jerking shadow-phantoms on the wall above the bed.

At first Father Ludwik could hardly tell that there was anyone lying huddled under the blankets of the single pallet bed. It looked as if one of the brothers had cast off his robe and dumped it untidily on the bed. It was only when the apparently discarded piece of clothing moved, and the gathered material of the cowl fell away from a head that was little more than skin stretched over a skull, that the priest knew there was anybody there at all.

The figure was frail and looked old—ever so old. His head was entirely bald and dotted with liver spots, the only visible hair being grey wiry eyebrows. His bony hands had been constricted into claws by some cruel, degenerative disease. The old man’s skin was paper thin, drawn tight about the bones beneath, veins of a cold blue obvious against the cold, white marble of what little flesh there was covering his withered body. The bone structure of his face was clearly visible, his cheekbones sharp, his jaw angular and defined, the line of his nose aristocratic, outlined by the flickering candle flame.

Ludwik turned away. He had seen death in all its myriad forms in his thirty years as a priest of Morr—soldiers who had suffered brutal physical injuries on the battlefield, casualties of plague, those who had died through misadventure, victims of murder. But there was something about this individual that made Ludwik turn away in revulsion.

It was not so much his appearance; Ludwik had seen much worse in his time. It was something else that the old priest couldn’t quite put his finger on. The old man looked as if he should be dead already; it certainly smelt as if he were. Nothing that was still alive should ever smell like that.

Father Ludwik shivered and pulled his own black sackcloth robe tighter about him; the cell was damnably cold, despite the embers of a dying fire in the grate. The priest took the iron stick of the poker from its stand by the fireplace and set about the smouldering logs in the hearth, rattling the poker furiously.

“Father, is that you?”

The old man’s voice was high-pitched and cracked, with the timbre of a broken bell. The sound of it made Ludwik’s spine feel as if it were made of ice water.

He took a deep breath to compose himself.

“It’s Brother Matteus, isn’t it?”

That was the name Brother Oswald had said the old man had given on being admitted to the hospice. It had been as clear to Oswald as it was now to Ludwik that the old man did not have long left in this world. As they had laid his convulsing, frail body on the single pallet and tucked him in, making him comfortable in the waiting cell, the old man had asked to speak with the father who was responsible for the hospice. No other priest would do; on that matter the otherwise feeble old man, failing fast, had been adamant.

The old man’s breathing was laboured and heavy. For a moment it seemed to Ludwik that it was all he could do to breathe, let alone speak. But then, at last, speak again the old man did. “Brother Matteus will suffice, for now.”

Uncertainty creased Ludwik’s brow into a frown. What could the old man mean?

Now that he came to think of it, Father Ludwik was not certain how Brother Matteus had come to be here at the temple in Bregerstadt. Neither did he know what the old man was dying from, just that he was evidently on his deathbed now. Surely it had to be from the haggard effects of old age. And it was the Brethren of Morr’s duty and responsibility to make sure that Brother Matteus’ last hours were as comfortable and as free from care as possible, being as he was a fellow servant of the solemn god of death.

“You wished to speak with me, brother,” Ludwik said.

“Indeed. Indeed I did, father,” the old man wheezed. His voice was little more than a rasping death rattle.

Ludwik was used to being addressed as “father” by the brothers and those who came seeking Morr’s favour and the ministrations of a priest of death for their departed loved ones. But now, coming from this old man, old enough to be Ludwik’s own grandfather, the term of address seemed ridiculous. He had to be easily thirty or even forty years older than the fifty-five year-old Ludwik, perhaps even pushing a century, although such longevity was almost unheard of. It must be the ravaging effects of some terrible illness that had aged him so badly, Ludwik surmised.

“Indeed. Indeed I did,” the old man repeated.

The man coughed, a horrible phlegmy gargle. He clutched a hand that was barely more than a skeletal talon to his belly beneath the rough blanket.

“Brother, what is it?” Ludwik asked, anxiety evident in his own voice now, moving toward the old man. “Let me help you.”

“No.” A hand kept the aging priest of Morr at bay.

The dying wretch took several more laboured breaths before trying to speak again. “I beseech you. Hear my confession.”

Looking at the feeble old man, Ludwik wondered what an old priest of Morr could have to confess on his deathbed that the god of death and dreams did not know already. But there were a thousand and one things that might trouble a man standing on the threshold of the portal to the otherworldly realm of the departed. A thousand and one things that could concern a man staring death in the face, as his eyes began to fail and see beyond the veil of this temporary world, looking into the grim shadow-eyed face of Morr himself.

“Of course, brother,” Ludwik said, sitting down on the chair that had been left next to Matteus’ bed.

If having his confession heard would make Brother Matteus’ final hours more bearable and help prepare him better for passage through that dread portal into the world beyond, then that was what Father Ludwik would do. It was little for a dying man to ask of a fellow priest of Morr.

As well as dealing with the dead, it was not uncommon for those at death’s door to come to the hospice asking to have their confession heard before they died, that they might enter the afterlife free of the burden of their sins in the hope that their passage through to the fields of the Morr might be accomplished more readily.

“Yes, that is what I need. A father figure to confess all to. A father figure who can grant me absolution.” The old man laughed. It was a bitter, mirthless sound. “How ironic.”

“I’m sorry, brother. What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Of course not.” The old man chuckled phlegmily. “But no matter. It is of no consequence. Like so much in our brief, pitiful lives. It is of no consequence at all.”

The old man coughed again and a fleck of spittle escaped from the white-crusted corner of his mouth, between the old man’s drawn, pale lips.

“But where to start? Where to start?” the old man repeated.

“You could start by telling me your true name,” Ludwik said.

“Yes, that would be sensible, if you are to hear my confession. It would be pointless confessing under another name. After all, where would that get me with austere Morr?”

The old man shifted himself onto his back, groaning painfully as he did so. “Very well. Let me tell you everything. My name is Dieter Heydrich, son of Albrecht Heydrich, and I was born and grew up in the village of Hangenholz, six leagues east and north of Bögenhafen at the edge of the Skaag Hills, twelve leagues from that accursed Sigmarite den of Altdorf. I was born three years into the reign of the renowned emperor Magnus, known as the Pious.”

Father Ludwik let out a slight gasp and sat back in his chair as though startled.

“What?” The old man fixed his confessor with beady black eyes that appeared needle-sharp in the flickering light of the candle.

“You are mistaken, brother,” Ludwik said. “That would make you over—”

“Two hundred years old,” the dying priest interrupted, wheezily. “Yes, I know. Two hundred and thirteen to be exact.”

Brother Matteus’—or rather Dieter Heydrich’s—mind must be addled, Ludwik thought. He didn’t know what he was saying. He looked old certainly, but over two hundred years?

“Go on,” Ludwik said, settling himself back in the chair.

“As I said, I was born during the reign of Magnus the Pious. You wonder how I can have lived for over two hundred years. Well, I shall confess that too. It’s simple really. I am a necromancer.”

The look the old man threw Ludwik with those words froze the father into stunned silence. The old man, Matteus or Heydrich, or whatever he was called, was clearly mad. First of all that he could have lived for over two centuries was ridiculous. Secondly, how could he be a necromancer, a dark wizard, a summoner of spirits? Necromancers were an anathema to the servants of Morr, the bane of their brotherhood. They desecrated the sacred resting places of the dead and despoiled Morr’s otherworldly realm with their depraved, morbid enchantments.

Ludwik obviously could not trust a word the man said.

What had caused this man to run mad and lose his mind like this, Ludwik wondered? Perhaps it was a consequence of all his years dealing with the dying and the dead, the horrors he had witnessed? Perhaps it was something else that had happened to him more recently. Perhaps it was his own dealings with a true conjuror of the dead.

Was this to be his own fate, Ludwik considered darkly, distracted for a moment?

“Do I shock you?” the old man wheezed.

“N-no, brother. No, of course not. It is just—”

“You agreed to hear my confession,” the old man reminded him sharply.

Ludwik tried to settle himself again, despite feeling intensely uncomfortable but still not entirely sure why.

Was it an understandable unease when confronted by such mental instability? Or did he secretly find the old priest’s claim plausible?

He had indeed agreed to hear the old man’s confession but there was blatantly doubt regarding the veracity of anything he might hear. But listen he would, if only to make the old priest’s final hours more bearable. It was his duty after all, Ludwik reminded himself. Although at this moment, it was a duty he honestly wished he did not have, no matter how many confessions he had heard before now.

“Go on, brother. I will hear your confession.”

“Then I shall begin at the beginning.”

And as the old man spoke, despite the crackling warmth of the roused fire, Ludwik felt the cold draw in about him like the chill hand of death itself.

NACHEXEN

The Doktor of Hangenholz

The first time I saw a corpse I was five years old.

Well, I suppose that is not entirely true. There had been Old Jack, Black Jack, the village’s protector, for a start. But it was the first time I had seen the dead body of someone who had been close to me. It seems strange now to think that I was ever close to anybody, but once, I have to admit, I was. It was my mother. She had died of a fever.

Did her death affect me deeply? Looking back now I believe it must have done, possibly more than even I realised at first.

My sister Katarina was only three at the time and could hardly even remember our mother. Our dear mother. But to me her smiling face is as warm and bright as it ever was when she was alive; even now after so many, many years.

It was she who bore us, who reared us, who cared for us. She was the one who fed us when we were hungry, gave us comfort when we were sick or insecure, cheered us when we were sad. She was the one who loved us.

And she was so much more to us than a mere mother. She was all the things that a mother should be, certainly. Provider, peacemaker, nurturer, carer and source of comfort. But she was also so much more. For she was a balance to our father. She gave us everything our father did not. She loved us.

Still to this day I do not understand why my father ever married, let alone why he had children. My memories of my father from before my mother’s death are of a sinister, distant figure, who might as well have been Morr himself to a terrified child. But my memories of him from the time after her death are darker still.

And besides, that was all so long ago now. So many years have passed.

So why is it that I can remember it as if it were only yesterday?

The sun rose wan and watery on the winter-chilled morning of the ninth day of Nachexen. The first lancing spears of burnished sunlight pierced the smeared glass of the carriage window, rousing the hunched young man from a state of disturbed semi-sleep.

Dieter Heydrich blearily opened his eyes and peered myopically out through the mud-spattered pane. Beyond that he didn’t move. The hood of his travelling cloak was bunched behind his head into a makeshift pillow, his thick mane of black hair half-hung over his face. His complexion was as pale as his hair was black. Dark bags of skin had formed under his eyes due to lack of sleep and a disturbed night’s rest.

They had stopped at Vagenholt for the night, at a coaching inn there. But one of the other passengers, a rotund, fat-moustached merchant from Altdorf had urgent business in Bögenhafen—something to do with meeting a barge travelling downstream from Weissbruck—and had provided the coachman with a gilt-edged incentive to get there at the same time as the morning’s river traffic plying its way on the Bögen, heading for the mighty Reik.

Opposite him the merchant who had requested the early start was still snoring into his moustache.

Not that Dieter minded arriving earlier than expected. He had been looking forward to this day for the last thirteen years, he realised now, almost ever since the untimely and unwelcome death of his mother prior to this day. The only sadness he had felt on leaving Hangenholz was the emotional wrench of leaving his beloved sister Katarina behind. He had asked her to come with him, pleaded even, but she had been adamant, her place was with their father. She would remain with the black-hearted old priest and keep house for him, as she had done for all of them from the age of seven. And he would miss her, he knew, almost unbearably so.

Dieter hadn’t spoken to any of his travelling companions; he hadn’t seen the point. He wasn’t going to see any of them again. And besides, he didn’t find it easy to make idle conversation with strangers. As soon as he had boarded the carriage at Karltenschloss, having made himself as comfortable as possible, all things considered, he had directed his gaze out of the carriage window, watching the wilderness of the Empire pass them by.

Not that it had stopped others trying to make conversation with him. A moneyed widow, in particular, all black gown, ridiculous overly ostentatious frills, podgy fingers and more than her fair share of chins. Dieter had given only curt responses to her incessant, probing personal questions and in the end had stooped to feigning sleep to escape the virtual monologue the dowager had sustained since leaving Karltenschloss. She had an opinion on everything, as had her late husband it seemed, from the price of Bretonnian wines—for which she had an obvious liking—to how the Empire should be run.

The red-nosed merchant had made polite conversation with her at first, every once in a while throwing conspiratorial, if not particularly subtle winks and smirks in the direction of his conspicuously disinterested travelling companion. The merchant had taken great pains to introduce the young man to everyone on board—as well as every innkeeper they had done business with on the three-day journey—as his nephew.

Dieter judged the young man to be of a similar age to himself, but that was where their similarity ended. The youth was a fop, dolled up like a mummer, in Dieter’s opinion, in silks and other expensive fripperies. Strategically placed beauty spots might be all the rage amongst the members of the ostentatious Imperial court, but to Dieter’s mind they looked out of place in the outlying market towns and country provinces of the Empire.

His appearance was certainly a stark contrast to Dieter’s plain cloak and well-worn and practical, rather than fashionable, jerkin, breeches and money belt. The merchant’s snooty companion was fair where Dieter was dark, his build cadaverously thin where Dieter, although slight, was toned. Jewellery adorned his fingers, wrists and ears, whilst Dieter wore none. The fop’s gaze was condescending and sarcastic where Dieter’s was brooding, guarded and tight-lipped. And he had nothing in common with the effete merchant or wittering dowager either.

As they had drowsily boarded the carriage again at Vagenholt, as the village bell was ringing four of the clock that morning, none of the four temporary travelling companions had been particularly ebullient, not even the dowager. The fop had picked at his nails in silence whilst the merchant had been the first to doze off to sleep again.

Even though he was excited to finally arrive at the town where he would make his name, on being roused by a grubby-faced urchin—the keeper’s son—Dieter had sleepily struggled into his clothes, musty from days of travel, feeling the first biting chill of morning in the fire-bereft spartan room. He then gathered up his scrip and dragged himself downstairs and onto the coach.

The single trunk that comprised the rest of his luggage was still strapped to the top of the carriage, along with the possessions of his fellow travelling companions. In fact it barely seemed that there was any room for his one piece of luggage when he saw how much the dowager was transporting with her and the skeins of cloth the merchant had insisted on bringing with him, along with the strongbox, replete with three heavy locks that he kept with him, beneath his seat, at all times.

All the luggage certainly didn’t seem to leave much room for the driver, the Four Seasons’ pistolier watchman and the merchant’s personally hired bodyguard—a brawny man with a polished dome of a head, sporting a brutal scar that bisected his right cheek and continued on, down the line of his neck, beneath the collar of his battered hauberk. The strong-arm’s broken-toothed grimace and ugly broken nose was enough to deter most opportunist robbers, Dieter thought, but just in case they didn’t persuade everybody, his brutal-looking battleaxe and shoulder-slung crossbow probably would. If any thieves persisted in the face of all of those warning signs, then they deserved whatever they got for their pains.

Dieter had thought that the two employees of the Four Seasons Company looked by far the worse for wear, but the merchant’s incentive was more than enough to shake their hangovers from them long enough for them to get the coach back on the road.

As the carriage jolted on its way, Dieter’s thoughts were drawn back to the home, the village and the people he had left behind. His sister, his father.

The last thing his father had done for him, before he had left Hangenholz, was to open his personal coffer and give Dieter the money for the coach fare to Bögenhafen.

There had been no words of well-wishing or any suggestion that Dieter might be missed. It was as if he was glad to be rid of his son. Now eighteen, and a man, it was time he made a name for himself in the world beyond Hangenholz, if that was what he was determined to do. It was as if Albrecht Heydrich did not understand what Dieter was trying to do with his life, that he wanted to make a difference.

It was only Katarina who had shown any emotion at her brother’s departure, the tears falling freely from the limpid deep brown pools of her eyes. The memory of the sadness he had seen in those eyes Dieter knew would haunt him for a long time to come, particularly in the dark watches of the night and the lonely times that undoubtedly awaited him in the days, weeks and months of study ahead.

Then she had pulled herself together again and wished him every blessing and told him how proud she was at what he was doing. And then the sadness in her eyes had been tempered by the familial love he felt for her, and from her, and an ember of pride flared into glowing life.

The memory of her warm words expressing pride and love would temper those dark times and bring some warmth into his heart, no matter what the trials and tribulations of the forthcoming years of study would put in his way.

The persistent snores of the merchant, the irritated sighs of his younger travelling companion and the dowager’s heavy breathing whistling through her yellow-stained teeth, Dieter watched the world go by, feeling the anticipation and excitement rising within him with every bump of the carriage, his breathing frosting on the cold glass of the window.

He was almost there, at Bögenhafen, at last. He was on the verge of beginning to fulfil a life-long dream, a desire he had harboured for the last ten years, when, at the age of eight, three years after his mother’s death, he was at last able to express what he had wanted to do since the day he was told that the brain-fever had taken his mother from him, and the life and love he had known, were taken with her.

Within a matter of hours now—if that—Dieter Heydrich would be admitted to the grand guild of physicians of Bögenhafen.

The old year had been and gone and now, with the buoyant new year celebrations of Hexenstag, and the eerie witching night of Hexensnacht eight days past, the first signs that spring was on its way were already upon the land, showing themselves on the trees, in the undergrowth, even in the scent of the air. New life would soon come to the Empire, following the dead months of winter, just as new life had come to the Empire twenty-two years before, when Magnus the Pious and the armies of the Empire had met and defeated the Great Enemy at the gates of Kislev and the Great Incursion by the North had been halted.

A subtle mist was rising from the swathes of meadow beyond the trees lining the road, the warming golden rays of the sun’s first light lifting the night’s dew from the ground. The first fresh green growth of spring almost seemed visible on the elms and alder, the still-lifeless fingers of the trees’ branches clawing at the grey sky and forming a canopy over the road.

In only a matter of days Dieter would begin training that would set him on the path to become one of the greatest healers the Empire had ever known.

And then, there between the trees, on the other side of the mist-shrouded meadows, he saw it, the grandeur that was Bögenhafen.

Dieter gave an audible gasp and felt his scalp tighten, his skin turning to gooseflesh. He had never seen anything like it. Dark stone walls rose up to crenellated battlements thirty feet high, containing the riot of even taller, steeply sloping-roofed town houses, tenements, mysterious towers and temple spires. The town had stood for hundreds of years and from first impressions Dieter thought it looked like it would stand for centuries more.

Port, market town or seat of learning; it was all these things and more to the overwrought Dieter. To him Bögenhafen embodied hope, deliverance from the peculiarities of his childhood, a future. It offered a life away from Hangenholz and the spectre of his father’s disappointment, dispassionate disinterest and deathly influence.

Dieter was fully awake now, exhilarated at the prospect of reaching Bögenhafen and commencing a new, more optimistic, chapter in his life.

It was claimed that town was the third largest in all the Reikland with a huge population at around the five thousand mark, and that did not include the passing travellers, bargemen, merchants, guard contingents, peddlers, pilgrims, livestock farmers and dispossessed, vagabonds, beggars and travelling actors, troubadours and other entertainers.

This wooded stretch of highway ran parallel to the imposing eastern wall of the town that looked like it could hold an army at bay for weeks, if not months. Fortunately for the people of Bögenhafen, during the Great Incursion of the Imperial year 2302, the invading armies of the north failed to reach as far south as the Reikland, although there was a rise in the activities of proscribed cults at the time and herds of beastmen ran amok throughout the forests, terrorizing the roads through for the best part of the year. Roadwarden patrols had been doubled at the time and templar purges of their forest strongholds were increased to deal with the growing menace.

At the north-eastern corner of the towering town wall another, much lower dry-stone wall enclosed the town’s graveyard, covering an area of some two acres, by the looks of it. Dieter could see only one gate leading into Morr’s field and he caught sight of a squat, grey chapel through the pillars and lintel of the lych-gate, hunched between the tumble of ancient gravestones and statues of mourning angels. For a moment, on seeing this, Dieter felt strangely at home. The sight of the cemetery was strangely comforting to him.

Beyond the graveyard a stand of trees ran down to the banks of the River Bögen in the distance.

The carriage continued along the main highway until it reached a broad, churned and rutted crossroads. The winter had made a muddied mess of the road here and work crews had yet to be sent to put it right. The last frost of winter still speckled the muddied channels formed by the passage of cart wheels and the hoof holes of animal traffic, making it look like the ground had been liberally sprinkled with tiny, glittering diamonds.

They turned right, approaching the town’s imposing east gate. It certainly was an impressive edifice, two tall, arrow-slitted towers dominating this view of the town wall, rising as they did on either side of a narrow, unassuming gateway. Lacking a castle, the walls and guard towers of Bögenhafen were impressive fortifications in their own right.

Hearing the strident, croaking caw of a carrion bird, Dieter turned his gaze on the thick oak post he could see firmly hammered into the ground beside the road. Looking up, he saw a cartwheel silhouette starkly dark against the dove grey sky. Hanging from it by the wrists were three naked corpses—those of thieves or murderers no doubt—secured by their ankles to the post itself. The carrion birds were already taking their breakfast from the peck-hole riddled cadavers, the flesh greening, the congealed blood black.

A trundling farmer’s cart laden with bales of straw was on the road ahead of them, being drawn by two lumbering oxen. They passed the cart as it turned off the road and passed between the hazel hurdles demarcating the perimeter of the livestock market. The Schaffenfest, renowned throughout the Reikland as one of the greatest livestock fairs to be held in the Reikland, was still two months away, but there was always a semi-permanent market based here for most of the year, only really closing down for the coldest winter months of Ulriczeit and Vorhexen. With Nachexen already a week old, the market had started up again.

Beyond the hurdle fence Dieter could see that the tents and temporary lean-to structures of the livestock market had already been erected for the new season. In truth, however, many of the barns had become semi-permanent also, possibly only changing location within the market field itself between the monthly gatherings there, but never really being taken down or dismantled entirely.

The gentle lowing of cattle and the pitiful bleating of early lambs, separated from their dams, drifted to Dieter’s ears across the wet meadow, along with the distinctive manure smell of livestock markets everywhere.

A heavy shadow fell across the carriage, a pall that reduced the bright morning light to a dusky twilight, as the imposing town wall rose up to meet them.

Buried at the heart of the massive gatehouse was the east gate itself. The town watch were in the process of changing shifts. A weary-looking older man saluted the two, yawning, unshaven men who had come to replace him before trudging through the gate himself, no doubt heading back to the guard barracks and thence to bed. All of the watchmen wore the yellow tabards over their leather armour displaying the town’s coat-of-arms—a merchant vessel above, the image of a fish below, separated by a bar set with three roundels.

Now that they were actually at the gates, which were already open to the day’s traffic, Dieter could see that they were in fact wide enough to admit two carts together, at a push. This realisation only served to make the towering gatehouse seem even more threatening and impressive. That, combined with the macabre reminder of the town’s justice system he had already seen outside the gates, gave an ominous message indeed to the young, would-be physician: once you are inside these walls you will live by our rules, follow our edicts, or pay the ultimate price.

The driver stopped the carriage at the gate. There was a rustling of papers and a muttered exchange between the driver and the watchmen. One of the two gate guards opened the door to the carriage and stuck a broken-veined, unshaven face inside, much to the chagrin of the dowager and the merchant. Then the carriage was moving again and they were through the gate, and Dieter enjoyed his first proper view of the town that was to be his home for the next two years at least.

Dieter sat in his seat at the window, his jaw agape as he took in the wonders of Bögenhafen. The carriage followed the main road, the Nulner Weg, into the town, rattling over the cobbles of the paved streets.

Dieter had visited towns before in his eighteen years, of course. Once or twice a year he had accompanied his father to the market-hub of Karltenschloss to collect alms from the Church of Morr and obtain supplies for the Chapel in Hangenholz. But Bögenhafen was something else again, three times larger than Karltenschloss, with a population four times the size. It was wondrous for the young scholar to behold.

The houses rose to a height of three, four or even five storeys above the street, with many of the upper floors jutting out further than the walls of the buildings. This meant little on the main thoroughfares through the town, but down the side-streets, the upper storeys jutted out so far that they turned the streets into darkened tunnels, where the sun, if there was any, only penetrated their chill depths for a few minutes during the hour when the sun was at its zenith. In the winter months this could mean that the streets saw no light at all and so only those who did not want their business known, or those who preyed on the business of others used those streets. It was worst in the poorest areas of the town.

The streets of Bögenhafen were still quiet this early in the day. In a few hours’ time they would be thronged with people going about their daily business. For the moment they were still the preserve of watchmen returning to their barracks following the night shift, market traders arriving early to set out their stalls and business-minded clerks ready to make the most of the day, having left late the evening before. A town like Bögenhafen was only as successful and as wealthy as its mercantile classes.

Dieter could see other streets running off to the left of the Nulner Weg, into the well-to-do mercantile district of the town. To the right narrower streets wound more torturously into the artisans’ quarter and the poorer parts of the town to the east.

And then, only two hundred yards along the cobbled street, a sign, creaking from a rusted iron bracket outside a solid stone building. The building was an imposing four-storey edifice with small, lead-paned windows on every floor, rising to a proliferation of turret rooms and slate-tiled pitched roofs.

Dieter glanced at the sign as it creaked in the gentle morning breeze being funnelled along the main street into the town from the river, bringing with it the aroma of stagnant mud and rotten fish. And then he was no longer glancing but staring, his heart racing and an elated smile breaking out on his face. The sign bore an image in peeling paint of a pestle and mortar: the sign of the physicians’ guild.

Dieter wanted to jump up, to cry out that the coach should stop and deposit him here, at his goal, the place that would mark the beginning of a new direction in his life, here in Bögenhafen. But Dieter had never been the most confident of individuals and his inherent shyness got the better of him now. He remained where he was, saying nothing.

And then the carriage had passed the guild house and Dieter saw the street opening out ahead of them, his attention drawn back to Bögenhafen as new wonders of the town were revealed to him. The carriage passed out of the Nulner Weg and into the paved expanse of the Göttenplatz. The wide-open space of the square was in stark contrast to the close-clustered tenements, shops and town house offices of the rest of the town. And a grand sight it was too, for the acre of the Göttenplatz contained the principle temples of the town.

The square was dominated by the grand Temple of Sigmar, a great hall of a building with a towering spire at either end, contained within its own walled grounds. The dowager made the sign of the hammer, while the merchant—also now awake—was busy pointing out the colonnaded hall that looked more like a merchants’ basilica court than a holy place. It was the centre of worship of Bögenhafen’s own patron deity, the merchant-boatman Bögenauer.

The carriage was currently passing a smaller building adorned with carved stone likenesses of wolves, this temple being dedicated to Sigmar’s rival within his own holy Empire, Ulric, god of war and winter. Ulric was more highly favoured in the northern provinces of the Empire, particularly in and around the city of the White Wolf itself, Middenheim. Beyond it, Dieter could see parts of a dome and tower belonging to another, more elaborate structure.

The frost was fading from the cobbles and slabs of the square. Dieter suddenly felt very small and insignificant in the face of such enduring, heavenly majesty.

To the right was the plain, unassuming frontage of a Temple of Shallya, goddess of healing. The temple-infirmary appeared to take the form of two wings surrounding an inner courtyard.

A few of the most dedicated, or desperate, faithful were already making their way to morning prayers at the various temples, most heading for the dominating presence of the Sigmarite temple. The clear tone of a tolling bell could be heard ringing out over the spires of the other temples across the Square of the Gods.

Then the carriage had passed through to the other side of the Göttenplatz and into the town’s administrative hub, the Dreiecke Platz, beyond. It was only a short journey from there, past Bögenhafen’s impressive town hall, with its pillared facade and impressive spires, and past the huge building housing the merchants’ guild, arriving at a two-storey coaching inn going by the name of the Reisehauschen.

Dieter eagerly disembarked from the Four Seasons coach, clutching his scrip, containing his few precious books and what little money he had, tightly to him. But he then had to wait to have his trunk unloaded as the dowager bossily demanded that the coachman help her down from the carriage before doing anything else.

Dieter was tired and sore from the journey but full of excitement and quiet enthusiasm for the adventure that lay ahead, for he was here at last, in Bögenhafen.

The corpulent merchant anxiously oversaw the unloading of his possessions as soon as he could and then disappeared inside the inn, followed by the fop and their bodyguard. The last thing Dieter heard from him, through the open door of the establishment, was the merchant demanding a room for him and the young man, who he was at pains once again to introduce as his nephew on his sister’s side.

Dieter’s trunk was unceremoniously dumped in the street outside the Reisehauschen, almost as an after thought by the grumpy coachman and his assistant. Then they climbed back onboard and guided the two horses, pulling the creaking carriage behind them, around to the back of the inn towards the stabling yard. With his travelling companions ensconced inside the inn, Dieter was left alone in the Bergstrasse. At the far end of the street he could see the fortified structure of the town’s west gate—as impressive and forbidding as that of the gate he had entered the city by, passing beneath portcullis and murder holes set into the mighty fortifications.

Dieter turned away from the west gate. That was not the way he wanted to go. He was here to stay. Taking a firm hold of the leather strap at the end of his trunk and hefting its end up, he began to make slow progress back along the Bergstrasse towards the physicians’ guild.

Taking a deep breath, his heart racing in anticipation and his mouth dry with nerves, Dieter knocked on the door at the top of the creaking stairs three times. He had wanted the knocks to sound strong and confident but in reality they sounded weak and pathetic.

Dieter felt tired, what with the re-commencement of his journey from Vagenholt and having had to drag his trunk containing all of his worldly possessions from one end of the town and halfway back again, it seemed. He had not been able to afford to pay for a private carriage or sedan chair, or even an unemployed stevedore from the docks, to ease his burden. His finances were a finite resource, until he was qualified at least, and not a bottomless pot to be dipped into whenever he felt the passing need.

Dieter was aware of movement in the room beyond and then the door opened. Standing in the doorway, the bare wood and lathe and plaster of the attic rooms visible behind him, was a tall, gangly youth, about Dieter’s age but possibly older, judging by the undisguised embittered expression of world-weariness on his face. He obviously did not appreciate being disturbed.

The young man was wearing an ill-fitting robe that was patently too short for his gangling frame. It was worn and threadbare in places, most obviously at the knees and elbows. He looked gaunt and as if he had not eaten well for some time. His hair was greasy and untidy. In his long-fingered hands he held a scrawny, ginger cat, which looked as if it had eaten only slightly better than the youth.

“Yes?” the youth asked irritably.

“Um,” Dieter hesitated, “I’m the new lodger. I’m sharing your rooms.” He was feeling the strain in his arm from holding the trunk at the top of the bare floor-boarded stairs.

“And you are?”

The cat gave Dieter a wild-eyed look, as it might regard a scampering mouse.

“Heydrich. Dieter Heydrich.”

“So old Frau Keeler’s found someone fool enough to share this draughty garret, has she? I suppose you’d better come in then.”

The gaunt young man moved back into the room, allowing Dieter to haul his trunk over the threshold but not offering to help in any way.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Dieter said, hesitantly polite.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” the youth replied. “The name’s Karlsen. Erich Karlsen.”

The mop-haired youth closed the door behind Dieter and then looked the hopeful physician’s apprentice up and down.

“So, what brings you to Bögenhafen? You’re not native, that’s for sure. That Reikland country burr is a dead giveaway.”

“I-I have come to train at the physicians’ guild,” Dieter said nervously but with an element of pride. “Frau Keeler mentioned that you were a. student of medicine yourself.”

“For my sins,” Erich replied, fixing Dieter with an almost suspicious look as he stroked the cat in his arms.

Dieter couldn’t help feeling slightly despondent, as his idealised image of what it would be like to train as a healer at Bögenhafen’s renowned physicians’ guild took another knock. It obviously showed in his face.

“Look, there’s no need to look like that, it’s not terminal, you know,” Erich said, casting his expressive eyes at the ceiling. “My advice is get back onboard the coach that brought you here and go back to wherever you came from. You’ll have a much more rewarding life that way I can assure you.”

“What’s the guild like then?” Dieter couldn’t help asking.

“An institution of old men whose minds are stagnating in their own preposterous arrogance.”

Dieter looked at Erich, appalled. Erich could hardly miss the look of innocent horror.

“It’s all right if you don’t mind being given all the cesspit jobs to do.”

“You are not enjoying your apprenticeship at the guild?”

“I have decided that it is a tedious and tiresome profession. Your time is spent studying dry, over-written, out-dated texts recommended by unimaginative, tiresome, out-dated, age-addled lecturers and you’ll be lucky if you even get to look at a living flesh and blood patient in your first year. But even that is more interesting than cleaning up after the senior guild members, rather than actually practising medicine for yourself.”

Erich was pacing across the garret now, like an actor speaking his soliloquy on the stage. He was stroking the cat behind its ears as he did so.

“Some get to try out their skills on the poor unfortunates imprisoned within the infirmary at the Temple of Shallya, of course, wretched souls who no longer have any family left to care for them—or at least none that actually care what happens to them. But even then as an apprentice you’re only working under direction from the guild masters. No, they’re all a waste of space if you ask me.”

“What of the master of the guild, Professor Theodrus?”

“He’s the worst of the lot. Anything he has to say is a criminal waste of the air we breathe, if you ask me, which, I would hasten to add before you look at me like that again, you did.”

For a moment neither of them said anything.

“So what’s Bögenhafen like?” Dieter asked at last to break the conversational impasse the two new roommates had seemed to reach.

“All right if you don’t mind the smell. In the summer the river, not to mention the open sewers that run down half the streets, stinks to high heaven and in the winter the mists coming off the Bögen get so thick you can’t even see the hand in front of your face. And the chill wind will freeze your bones to the marrow—especially in this place,” he concluded, indicating the attic space with a roll of his eyes.

Dieter’s disappointment grew, but he had to admit that he felt colder here than he had waking up as the draughty carriage approached Bögenhafen that morning.

He paced sullenly across the attic, leaving his trunk where it was, and looked out of the grimy pane of the nearest of a pair of dormer windows. He found himself looking east across the rooftops of the town towards the looming shadow of the town wall. This part of Bögenhafen was an overcrowded region of crumbling towers and tenements that had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair over the last few hundred years, away, as they were, from the commercial and administrative centres of the town, and riddled with a maze of hidden, half-forgotten alleyways and rat-runs, some of the buildings connected by apparently inaccessible buttressed footbridges and wooden staircases clinging to the mouldering brickwork.

Beyond the black line of the wall battlements, the watery yellow-ochre disc of the sun had become a line of wan colour outlining the parapet of the wall. Dieter realised he had lost all track of time during the course of his eventful day, first having to wait at the guild for what seemed like an eternity whilst his application was processed—the porter having determined that Dieter was not an envoy from one of the more politically important noble houses requesting a doktor’s aid for his lord and master—and then having to search out lodgings in the town.

“Look, enough of this. I’m even starting to depress myself. Let’s go for a drink.”

Erich dropped the cat, which gave a yowl as it landed on the floor, hissed at its fickle master and then stalked off beyond a partition to where Dieter could see the foot of an unmade bed.

“Oh… um… all right,” Dieter hazarded. He wasn’t used to that sort of thing. To tell the truth he wasn’t used to socializing at all, nor was he at ease with it.

There had only been one drinking house in Hangenholz and Dieter had not been comfortable going there. Everyone had known who he was and his father would inevitably find out about it. A village tavern was not the kind of establishment a priest of Morr would choose to spend time in—at least not Albrecht Heydrich—so neither should his son. But Dieter was his own man now, and although it still might not be the kind of thing he was used to doing, he did not want to alienate his new roommate, who he would have to spend so much time with and the one person he even remotely knew in a strange and overwhelming city.

“Where should we go?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, country boy,” Erich said, smiling for the first time since he and Dieter had met, although it was an expression that spoke to Dieter of even more uncomfortable situations to come. “I know a place.”

“What did you think of the lecture?” Dieter heard a voice ask breathlessly at his shoulder. The accent was native to the town Bögenhafen itself.

Dieter looked round to see another student trotting to catch up with him as they left the lecture chamber. He looked to be the same age as Dieter, with a tidy head of blond hair and fuzz of a beard on his chin, cut in the way that Dieter believed was the fashion in the Imperial capital of Nuln. He was obviously also a stone or two heavier than the more wiry young man from Hangenholz. The student was clutching a half-open scrip to his chest, parchment and quill pen spilling out of it.

“Fascinating. Better than I had expected.”

“Better than you had expected? What do you mean by that?”

“Oh… It doesn’t matter. In truth it was everything I had hoped it would be.”

“Professor Theodrus is certainly an excellent speaker, isn’t he?”

“He is obviously a highly intelligent man and extremely knowledgeable.”

“Extremely,” the other young man agreed enthusiastically. “Was this your first lecture here?”

“Yes. Yours too?”

“Oh yes, absolutely.”

The two men came to a halt in the passageway outside the operating theatre-cum-lecture room, as the bustle of the other students continued to wash past them.

“Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself,” Dieter’s conversation companion said, proffering him an outstretched palm, at the same time almost dropping his bulging scrip as he let go with one hand. “Leopold Hanser.”

“Dieter Heydrich.” Dieter uncertainly offered the other his own hand in return and the two of them shook. This was a very different greeting to the one he had received from his fellow lodger, Erich Karlsen.

“Where are you from?” Leopold asked in a friendly manner.

“Hangenholz. It’s a small place. You won’t have heard of it. It’s about six leagues from Bögenhafen.”

“Have you been in Bögenhafen long?”

“Three days.”

“So what do you think of the guild?”

“It’s incredible, truth be told.”

“Yes, I would have to agree with that diagnosis, as Professor Theodrus would say,” Leopold chuckled.

“I take it you’re from Bögenhafen yourself?”

“That’s correct. I live with my mother, a widow. I’m the man of the house now; have been since the age of thirteen. But my father’s inheritance won’t last forever. So I’m putting myself through the guild, following in my father’s footsteps, as it were. He was a respected doktor. And now I’m making a career for myself.”

“I suppose this—the guild, Bögenhafen—is nothing new to someone like yourself,” Dieter said, almost admiringly.

“Oh I don’t know about that. This town has its fair share of excitements for citizen and visitor alike. I expect you have already heard tell of the Corpse Taker.”

“The Corpse Taker?” Dieter repeated, anxiety etching itself across his pale expression of uncertainty. “N-No. I haven’t.”

“Well I’m surprised by that revelation, friend Dieter,” Leopold said and then took him to one side of the passageway, conspiratorially. “It’s all the talk amongst the guild students at the moment, since the second body disappeared from Morr’s mortuary in the cemetery since Hexensnacht.”

Dieter felt a shiver pass involuntarily down his spine like a drop of ice water. Hexensnacht was as reviled as the New Year’s Day of Hexenstag was celebrated. It was a night when both the moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb were full in the sky. It was a night when even the most hardened cynics stayed out of the eerie moonlight cast by the twin satellites, for it was during the hours of darkness that all manner of evil made its way through the world of men, a night when spirits walked and daemons held sway. It was the Witching Night.

“They say Father Hulbert was up in arms about it. He’s petitioned the town council to post men-at-arms at the entrance to Morr’s field to stop it happening again.”

“Father Hulbert?”

“The attendant priest of Morr.”

“So who is this Corpse Taker?” Dieter asked, unnerved.

“The name originates from a folktale told to children by their parents to scare them and keep them in line. But now it seems that the Corpse Taker is no nursery bogeyman after all. The first bodies began to go missing as the old year died. Three in the space of as many months. The first was hardly missed. The body belonged to that of a hanged criminal. The second was apparently a beggar who had died of exposure, outside the Temple of Shallya of all places. The third was that of a man pulled out of the Bögen. But now there have been two more disappearances in the space of a week, both from the mortuary chapel of the cemetery itself.”

“But who would do such a thing?” Dieter asked, appalled. “And why?”

“Botolphus, apprentice to Doktor Fitzgarten, overheard some of the senior members talking in Fitzgarten’s office. They fear it is the work of necromancers.”

Dieter felt the blood drain from his cheeks.

Necromancers, he thought. The very bane of all life and of his father’s life in particular. He had heard his father say as much on several occasions. They were the blight of Morr and the mortal enemies of his guardian priesthood.

Dieter even loathed the idea of them. That anyone should wish to tamper with Morr’s plan and desecrate the final resting places of the dead, and then on top of that to bring the dead back to unholy, inhuman life for their own gain, to further their own insidious plans, was unthinkable to him.

He had come to a town where a madman, murderer or even a summoner of the dead terrorised the watches of the night. And three days ago Bögenhafen had seemed to offer him so much promise. Now the thought of spending another night in the town unsettled him deeply.

Erich Karlsen had also heard the rumours about the Corpse Taker. He, however, was less taken in by the idea that the phantom bodysnatcher was a practitioner of the black arts.

“There are all manner of physicians and surgeons working within a town this size,” he said one evening as Dieter found himself treating Erich to another flagon at the Cutpurse’s Hands. “And they’re not all licensed by the guild, mark my words. Progressive thinkers or dangerous madmen, they all need to get the bodies they use in their studies from somewhere. And there are plenty desperate and immoral enough to do their dirty work for them, exhuming corpses from their graves for a small fee.”

Erich took another swig from his tankard and fixed Dieter with a knowing look. “Not everything untoward that happens in this world is down to dark magic. There is evil enough in the hearts of men without the need for necromancers and daemons as well.”

As the days of their mutual confinement in the garret quarters had passed, Dieter found himself warming towards the slovenly, rebellious Erich. There was something secretly charismatic about the unruly apprentice physician. And for his part, Erich seemed to enjoy having someone as young and naive, and as easily impressed or shocked, as Dieter. New to the uncaring life of a busy market town and still for the most part innocent to the ways of the world, Erich could regale Dieter with his stories of an exuberantly youthful excess in a town that had almost anything a rebellious young man could want on offer. Erich also had a captive audience when he wanted to espouse on what he thought was wrong with the world or rather, the physicians’ guild, or the guild of fossils as he preferred to call it. It soon became apparent to Dieter that the reason why Erich could not afford to live anywhere better was because he had found other things to spend his allowance on. He had frittered it away on the good life, wild carousing rather than comfortable accommodation.

Their lodgings were in a street off the Eisen Bahn, in one of the poorer parts of the city, but it was the only place Dieter, or Erich, could afford to live. There were three other people sharing the crumbling tenement with them. Frau Keeler, their harridan of a landlady, lived on the ground floor of the building. She had told Dieter that the rooms on the first floor were let to a noted playwright and actor, one Franz Liebervitz. In truth Liebervitz was a weirdroot user with a fondness for seducing the latest young starlet to try to find fame in the theatre. The second floor apartments were used on an occasional basis by one of the town’s most highly regarded merchants, who Frau Keeler assured Dieter she was too discreet to name, for his cousin to stay during her frequent visits to Bögenhafen from the Imperial Court in Nuln. That left only the rooms on the third floor, really nothing more than the spartanly decorated attic of the crumbling lodging house, where Dieter and Erich resided in their thinly partitioned rooms. All of the apartments could be accessed from a rickety wooden staircase that ran up the entire height of the building, from a front door that opened directly onto the stinking refuse channel street of Dunst Strasse.

So this was what life in Bögenhafen was like, Dieter considered as he tried to get to sleep that night, in an uncomfortable bed in draughty lodgings, in a town full of people who seemed either not to like him without even having to meet him—apart from Leopold and Erich—and with a body snatcher, or possibly worse, on the loose. Dieter could not help feeling a little disappointment. His dream was not quite all he hoped it would be in reality.

But at least he was finding his feet at the physicians’ guild now. Nothing could truly quash his enthusiasm for the path he had set himself upon, and that was all that truly mattered. After only two or three years his training would be complete and he could return to Hangenholz and his beloved sister Katarina.

He saw her face now as his eyelids closed, her swan neck and almond eyes so like their mother’s, her shining hair, the sheen of her dark tresses like moonlight on a lake at midnight, framing her delicate, pale features. So like their mother. So unlike their father. And then, unbidden, the crow-black figure of his love-lacking father came into sharp focus in his mind’s eye.

No longer would he just be the loner son of Albrecht Heydrich, priest of Morr, Dieter determined. He would be Dieter Heydrich, doktor of physick, Healer of Hangenholz. Yes, he liked the sound of that. Hunched under his rough-haired blanket on the thin straw mattress of his bed he tried the title out in his mind, as weary sleep pulled at him.

Yes. Dieter Heydrich—Doktor Heydrich—the doktor of Hangenholz.

And then as sleep took him at last, one last, haunting image swam into his mind and his dreams. It was a face he had never seen before, one he could never have seen before. A horrific bandaged face with one baleful yellow eye peering through the bloodstained rags, its mouth a mess of drawn back gums and rotting elongated teeth. But he knew who it was nonetheless, although he knew not its import at that time.

It was the face of the Corpse Taker.

JAHRDRUNG

Krieger

Looking back now, it’s hard to believe that I was ever actually impressed by that blinkered old bigot, Theodrus. His mind was as closed to new thinking as a cast-iron strongbox. He could not bring himself to believe that there might be another way, another avenue of knowledge more far-reaching and powerful than his own. For he was a coward at heart, afraid of those who dared to question the primitive, out-dated understanding of the world that he held to be irrefutable truth, a way of thought that he would not let go of, like a mongrel with a scavenged leg of mutton. The guild master was a craven, opinionated sop whose position of power and influence was built on a feeble-minded adherence to the received knowledge and practices of others.

But looking back, however much I might despise the memory of Theodrus, it is nothing compared to the hatred and contempt I hold even now for that whoreson witch hunter, Ernst Krieger, Barakos take him.

Witch hunters! A pox on them! May they rot in the festering hells of their own creation, burning perpetually at the stake, throttled by their own intestines, as they have sent so many untold thousands to their deaths, innocent and guilty alike.

They dare to call themselves templars, divinely inspired holy warriors, knights of Sigmar. In truth they pursue their own obsessive hunts and exorcise their own daemons on the frail flesh of others.

They are a plague upon mankind, worse than anything the servants of the Ruinous Powers could ever conjure up. They claim piety and to be the true servants of Sigmar, yet they spread suspicion like a sickness. Their unbridled paranoia and pathological mistrust of others unnerves, terrifies and ultimately alienates the Heldenhammer’s otherwise faithful flock.

None can match their impossible, exacting ideals and expectations, so all—save Sigmar himself—are found wanting. And since they are the representatives, and instruments, of Sigmar’s divine retribution on the earthly plane, anyone they suspect of heresy is immediately considered to be guilty. And of course anyone who dares to disagree with them is a heretic.

They are mentally unbalanced, obsessive, irrationally paranoid individuals. They will burn, drown or put to the sword anyone—regardless of age or gender—without clemency. They are utterly without mercy and most of them are without reason of any sort. They encourage fanaticism and the mortification of the flesh, knowing little of its power. They breed discontent and spread antagonism in their wake.

Their idea of justice is to put the accused through one of their barbaric ordeals. They extract confessions, false or otherwise, by torture, many of those they abuse in this way succumbing before ever facing the ultimate punishment the witch hunters have proscribed for them—much to the villains’ disappointment and chagrin.

There are few who escape the prying suspicious intentions of witch hunters, not even others of their accursed kind. They are dangerous individuals whose merest word can stir up mass hysteria among a town’s populace and encourage a mob mentality that results in rioting and causing an otherwise peaceful crowd to bay for blood. Anyone who is slightly different can end up dead—strung up from the gallows or burnt at the stake—killed by people’s fear of what they don’t understand.

I hate them all with a burning black passion—this I do not seek forgiveness for—and none more so than that daemon Ernst Krieger.

The rest of the month of Nachexen passed in a whirl of excitement for the newly inducted apprentice of Bögenhafen’s physicians’ guild. Despite the promising signs that had appeared earlier in the month that spring was coming, now it seemed that winter showed no sign of releasing the town from its icy grip. In fact the weather seemed to worsen and the temperature dropped again as the days and weeks passed, to the point where on the twenty-first day it seemed that the relentless River Bögen itself might freeze and bring the barge traffic on the river to a standstill. Despite this fact, there still seemed to be a fair number of barges passing through the town bearing cargoes from as far away as Talabheim and the port of Marienburg.

But the cold weather did nothing to deter the increasingly enthusiastic Dieter Heydrich from his studies. As each day passed, he began to feel that he had truly found his calling in life, his vocation. Indeed his passion for his subject blazed so strongly within him that he barely noticed the cold of the attic room he shared with fellow student Erich Karlsen, a damp cold that seeped through his robes and even the blankets on his bed, as if his enthusiasm warmed him and kept the cold at bay at this dead time of the year.

For Dieter, Nachexen passed with daily attendances at the physicians’ guild listening to lectures given by the Guild Master Professor Theodrus and other senior members. Much time was also spent preparing the ointments, solutions, syrups, unguents and powdered remedies used by the physicians when practising medicine.

To begin with, Dieter was put to work preparing those medicines required by the respected sage Doktor Hirsch, who counted members of the noble merchant families of the town amongst his patients.

But then on the morning of Backertag the following week, after only five days’ service to Doktor Hirsch, Dieter received a summons to the chambers of Professor Theodrus himself.

“You show promise, Heydrich. You appear to have an almost intuitive understanding of the human body and its humours,” the professor told him at their meeting.

And that was that. Dieter was now apprentice to the head of the guild himself.

When he wasn’t attending to those duties he now fulfilled for Professor Theodrus, Dieter spent as much time in the library as he could. The keeper of the books, one Kubas Praza, quietly boasted that the Bögenhafen physicians’ guild’s library rivalled that of the guild house in Altdorf and contained some rare texts that could not even be found in the Shallyan temple in the city of Couronne over the Grey Mountains in the land of Bretonnia, the centre of the Cult of Mercy.

Erich continued to attend to his duties at the guild haphazardly and once it became common knowledge that Dieter was his roommate, the errant apprentice’s mentor—or rather overseer—Doktor Panceus stopped Dieter in the corridors of the guild house on more than one occasion to berate Erich and put the onus on Dieter to cajole his slovenly, defiant fellow lodger to attend.

One such incident occurred when Dieter and Leopold were making their way to a lecture on the last Konigstag of Nachexen. Leopold was updating Dieter with regard to the latest outrageous rumours about the phantom Corpse Taker when a wild white-haired man, as bony as a skeleton and as drawn as a plague victim, burst out of a door only a matter of feet in front of the two. He looked up and down the corridor, his soot-smeared face a portrait of fury. Dieter recognised the aging physician at once.

“Shallya damn him!” the old man exclaimed, his outburst making him cough phlegmily. “Where is that insolent whoreson wretch?”

Then his wild, bradawl eyes fixed on Dieter. “Heydrich! Where is Herr Karlsen, eh? Where is he, the blackguard?”

Dieter and Leopold were pulled up abruptly. Everyone knew Doktor Panceus. Panceus was Erich’s long-suffering master at the guild. He was renowned as an expert in the field of alchemical chemistry and was also slightly feared as being an irascible, unpredictable character.

“Um. I don’t know, Doktor Panceus,” Dieter said nervously, hoping that he didn’t sound as uncertain and as wavering as he felt.

“You don’t know? You don’t know? You lodge with him don’t you? Isn’t that what I heard? Eh?”

“I haven’t seen him today, doktor,” Dieter added, feeling that he was being blamed for Erich’s absence from the guild.

Leopold looked from Dieter to the wild-eyed doktor and back again, but said nothing.

“Probably drinking his poor father’s fortune away, I expect, down in one of those seedy dockside bars. Or still under the covers with some schilling and farthing whore!”

Panceus suddenly grabbed Dieter roughly by the front of his robe and pulled his face close to his own hooked beak of a nose. The doktor’s visage was pockmarked and wild white hair seemed to burrow up out of every part that wasn’t smeared with soot and the residue of Shallya knew what bizarre, unstable experiments. His breath stank of sulphur for some reason.

Indeed, Doktor Panceus had a reputation for being one of the only guild members who still actively experimented and tried to advance the boundaries of his science, rather than merely passing down previously received knowledge and honing delicate handiwork skills such as suturing, cauterising and amputation.

Dieter found himself staring into the bulging pinprick pupil eyes of the crazed master apothecary.

“Is it any wonder I give him the midden jobs if he never bothers to turn up? That boy has to learn respect. How can he hope to practise medicine if he has no respect? Damn his eyes! I’ll have to get Georg to do it.”

Dieter glanced over Panceus’ shoulder, unable to bear the doktor’s needling gaze any longer. The room beyond the Panceus’ open door was a smoke-darkened chamber, the brickwork of a huge fireplace dominating the room blackened with soot. Dieter could feel the heat radiating from the brickwork inside the laboratory. Cowering beside the chimney breast was an even more soot-stained urchin whose job it was, for a measly three farthings a week, to keep the fire hot and keep a watch on the cauldrons hanging over the flames. The birch Panceus used to beat the boy, if he ever failed in his duties, hung on the wall next to him. The rest of the room was cluttered with wooden work benches littered with alembics and various pestles and mortars full of brightly coloured compounds.

“Well when you next happen to bump into Herr Karlsen, tell him that if he lets me down again I shall have to have words with the professor about his position within the guild,” Panceus spat.

From what Dieter had gleaned from his occasional conversations with Erich in the Cutpurse’s Hands, the heir to the Karlsen estates was in truth assured as long as his father kept paying the guild fees. And his father would, as long as it kept Erich away from his family estates.

In terms of his practical ability, as well as his mental acumen, it soon became apparent that Dieter was a fast learner and a skilled practitioner. By the time the lightening skies and thawing frosts of Jahrdrung had supplanted the bitter chill of Nachexen, it seemed that Dieter had learnt as much in the past month as his roommate Erich had learnt in the past two years, if not more.

However, despite his unabashed resentment and bitterness, which he made no effort to hide in front of Dieter, his roommate’s passion for physick did seem to be rubbing off on Herr Karlsen, who began attending the guild on a more regular basis. Or it might just have been a result of the warning he received following Panceus’ latest complaint to Theodrus, Dieter was of course prepared to admit.

But perhaps Dieter’s passion intrigued him. Perhaps it was just the challenge—the mutual competition—he needed to buck his ideas up and make an effort once again. However, Dieter soon learnt that part of the reason for Erich’s apathy had been because no matter how hard he tried, he simply did not have the natural aptitude for the subject that the country boy from Hangenholz did. So it was that Erich also harboured a growing jealously towards Dieter.

“I like you, Herr Heydrich,” he had said once as they shared another bottle of Reikland Hock that Erich had procured, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t envy you and hate you with a passion. You’re a simple country boy, naive and innocent and no mistake, but you have an intellect as sharp as a Carroburg broadsword and an ability that could rival that of Theodrus himself.”

Erich emptied his glass and poured himself another half glass. Dieter had hardly touched his wine. He had discovered that it went to his head too quickly if he wasn’t careful. Erich, on the other hand, seemed to be able to down a bottle by himself and not show any ill effects at all.

“I don’t think you realise how talented you are,” Erich went on, “but others do, including Theodrus. That could go either way for you. It could make you his rival, in his eyes, and have him put you down at every opportunity. But I think he’s too arrogant for that. So it could mean he’ll look on you with favour. And either reason could be why he has you apprenticed under him now; it could be to nurture you, or to keep you in your place. I might not have the ability to become a renowned healer but I know people.”

Throughout the weeks of diligent study, Dieter also received regular missives from his sister Katarina back in Hangenholz. They would come in whenever there was a delivery with a coach running from Karltenschloss, the nearest settlement on the major routes through the Empire, the letters having been taken that far initially by any willing farmer taking his wares to the town to trade.

And amongst all this hustle and bustle of Dieter’s new life, he was still reminded of the life he had left behind whenever he received a letter from his devoted and loyal sister. Katarina’s letters kept him up-to-date with all that was happening in Hangenholz and let him know that his sister was coping there without him, caring for their father, seeing to his needs. They were a comforting reminder to him of home. There were never any letters from his father.

To begin with, Dieter dutifully replied to each and every one of Katarina’s missives, as he had resolved to do, sending them back via the Four Seasons Coach Company, operating out of the Reisehauschen inn. But as time went on and Dieter’s waking hours became more full by the day—preparing medicinal compounds, studying the treasured texts in the guild library and spending time shadowing Professor Theodrus as he went about his doctorial business amongst the rich and titled members of Bögenhafen’s population—he found that resolution starting to slip.

At first his replies became more concise. In contrast, his sister’s epistles were as detailed as ever, telling Dieter all that was happening at home and roundabout with the changing of the seasons, and expressing pride and love in equal great measure for her noble brother the scholar.

But it was only when another such missive arrived on the second Angestag of Jahrdrung that Dieter realised that not only had he not replied to his sister’s previous communiqué, he had not even finished reading it yet. He truly had become less conscientious about replying to them, so caught up was he in his studies.

Looking at the half-finished essay on common diseases of the Reikland—their causes, prevention and cure—that he had been in the middle of composing before the urchin delivering the letter on behalf of the coach company interrupted him, Dieter pushed the parchment to one side with a sigh.

He took up the unread letter that had been sitting on his desk under a pile of books for a week and read it through, poring over every last phrase and syllable, enjoying his sister’s cursive hand and the patterns the words made on the page, feeling a forgotten warmth growing within his heart again. His own handwriting had become little more than a scrawl now, as he tried to jot down everything he wanted to as quickly as possible, so that he might fill his mind with yet more knowledge.

Dieter broke the seal on the more recent missive and read that through too, noting with only a cursory concern that their father had taken to his bed of late and his curate, one Engels Lothair from the nearby hamlet of Gabelbrucke, had been fulfilling more and more of his priestly duties. The son wondered how long the father would, or even could, continue in his work.

Then, both letters read, Dieter took a fresh piece of parchment from the sheaf on his desk, picked up the quill with which he had been writing his essay, and dipping it in the ink well, with a contrite heart began.

My dearest Katarina,

I must confess that your brother has been lax in his filial duties, so inspired and preoccupied have I been by my studies at the guild here in Bögenhafen. I know I have told you before what a wonderful place it is. So much more than a mere market town, it is a veritable seat of learning. It would seem that all the secrets of nature and the spheres are here to be uncovered among the myriad precious volumes that array the shelves of the guild libraries of this town. I can hardly believe that anywhere can have more knowledge contained within its bounds, not even noble Nuln or Altdorf.

I was pleased to hear that you are not finding the work of caring for our father too onerous and that Josef Wohlreich has been helping keep the garden.

As your brother it is my duty, however, to tell you to beware of Josef’s advances. He is more than twenty years your senior and although I remember him to be a man of some standing in the village, when your duties to our father are complete, do you want to be forever keeping another old man? Do not make the same mistake our mother did.

The world beyond Hangenholz has so much more to offer a young woman such as you. Do not throw your life away, trapped forever within the village of our birth. I believe that we are meant for something more than that.

Please give my regards to our father. I remain ever your devoted, loving brother,

Dieter

There, he was done. The letter was a fraction of the length of anything he had received from Katarina but his new life was full enough as it was. He was rising at dawn to commence his studies and would then spend a full day at the guild, learning all he could from the senior members there, not just his apprentice-master Professor Theodrus.

Most days Dieter would leave after dusk had taken hold of the town and make his way back to his lodgings in Dunst Strasse, joining the labourers, traders and artisans returning to their homes for the night, passing watch patrols and evening revellers as they made their way through the streets of Bögenhafen. The streets were as full of hustle and bustle as they were during the day at this hour. Soon the revellers would be ensconced within their favourite drinking establishments and stews on the Hagenstrasse, the lamplighters work would be done until the morning snuffings, and those exhausted by a day’s work would be safely at rest at home. The streets then would only be home to the night watchmen, schilling and farthing whores and those who had no business being about at all.

Most nights Dieter would take his evening meal at the Pestle and Mortar, and sometimes Erich would join him and spend the time berating Doktor Panceus, mocking the boy Georg and their fellow students, or lamenting the state of his life in general. Erich was a talented and heartless mimic, and Dieter had to admit that he had the various characters from the guild down pat.

The meal was always modest fare—a hunk of bread, a slab of hard cheese, cold meats—and once it was done he would politely excuse himself from Erich’s company and return to the garret room they shared where he would work into the night by candlelight, filling his notebooks with all that he had learnt and continuing to peruse the works of other practitioners in the field that he had borrowed from the library.

Sometimes Dieter would hear Erich return to their lodgings as he was settling down to sleep but just as often he would be disturbed later in the night by his roommate’s drunken shushing, or then again, not at all.

Apart from Erich’s growing, self-pitying jealousy and resentment, life really couldn’t be better for Dieter at that time.

At least, that was, until Brother-Captain Krieger of the Templar Order of Sigmar arrived in Bögenhafen.

Dieter was unsurprisingly studying at the guild at the time. He was firmly ensconced within his favourite musty haunt of the library within one of the enclosed, heavy oak study stalls that stood in the centre of the high-ceilinged space between the groaning teak bookcases, studying the Il Corpo Umano, by the eminent and long-dead Tilean physician-philosopher Umberto Casale. His first awareness of a disturbance was when he thought he heard shouting and pounding footsteps in the corridor outside the draughty, two-storey hall of the library.

The students of the guild had already heard of the arrival of Brother-Captain Krieger in Bögenhafen, his name being linked as it was with that of the Corpse Taker. Rumour spread like an unchecked flood through the laboratories and common room of the guild. The word amongst the students was that Krieger had been sent from the headquarters of the order’s temple in that centre of Sigmar worship, Altdorf. Word was that he had come riding into the town on a midnight black stallion, arriving as the clock struck midnight on the twenty-third day of Jahrdrung, to put the Bögenhafen chapter house in order. Word was that he was in the town to discover the identity of the Corpse Taker and hunt the macabre felon down.

In fact it had been all anyone was talking about in the Pestle and Mortar two nights earlier. Erich was finishing off his second flagon of ale far too quickly, whilst Dieter was still supping at his first of the evening. “I’d pay anything to see their faces down at the guild when this Krieger gets round to investigating them,” Erich was chuckling cruelly. “And he will. There’s always been a deep distrust between the Order of Sigmar and the physicians’ guild.” Dieter had even smiled at the thought too. But that had been two days ago and things were about to take a very serious turn for the worse as far as Dieter was concerned.

With a crash, the heavy oak door of the library opened, shattering the scholarly, musty silence of the place. The library usually had an almost sacred stillness to it, like a holy sanctuary, but now that had been banished by the arrival of the witch hunter.

He had the bearing of a man used to having to get what he wanted by force, and who was happy to do so. And certainly no feeble physician’s apprentice was going to stand in his way.

The man stood over six feet tall in his leather riding boots and although he looked to have already reached middle age, rather than making him appear past his prime he simply looked all the stronger for it. Dieter could see cords of muscle tightening at the man’s neck as he laid eyes on him.

Krieger’s profile was one of chiselled nobility, his jaw jutting and distinguished, his grey hair and neatly trimmed beard close-cropped. His eyes were sharp, piercing points of brilliant sapphire blue and his bared teeth were set in a snarling canine grimace. He had the unmistakable look of a killer about him, even to one as naive and inexperienced of life as Dieter.

The witch hunter did not favour the wide-brimmed buckled black hat worn by so many of his kind, nor did he sport a whole array of talismans and holy symbols of his faith. He was simply dressed as a warrior, in leather armour sewn with metal rings. A sheathed sword hung from his belt, as did the various other tools of his trade, including a coil of rope and a set of thumbscrews. He did not need to dress to intimidate or prove his holy worth. There was an almost intangible air about him that suggested his actions and his deeds would be proof enough that he was the best man for the job.

“Herr Heydrich!” the witch hunter captain boomed.

Dieter felt cold shock at hearing the witch hunter call his name. But the commanding tone demanded respect and Dieter found himself slowly rising to his feet. “Yes, sir?”

“With me, now, heretic!”

Dieter noticed Friedrick Koss, a fellow apprentice in his first year of study at the guild, standing at the witch hunter’s shoulder. Koss, a whole head shorter than Krieger, was looking at Dieter with undisguised detestation. Dieter knew that many of the other apprentices were jealous of his ability and position within the guild, just as amidst the petty politicking of the guild some of the more senior physicians were envious of Professor Theodrus’ position. It was one of the reasons why Theodrus surrounded himself with an entourage of like-minded guild members and wide-eyed idolising students.

Dieter knew that Friedrick was apprenticed to Benedict Vergis, the renowned herbalist, who was known to be one of the strongest rivals to the professor’s position, even though he publicly paid fealty to Theodrus. If Theodrus’ most favoured pupil was to be handed over to the witch hunters then the guild master’s own position would be brought into question and put into jeopardy, and Vergis would be able to take subtle steps to wrest control of the guild’s interests from Theodrus. And if Koss were the one to provide Vergis with that opportunity, it would do his own advancement within the guild no harm at all.

Dieter felt physically sick. He had only encountered Krieger’s like once before, eight years earlier, back in Hangenholz. The villagers had only known the heavily cloaked and hooded stranger by the name Kreuzfahrer but Dieter’s father, had told him the man’s profession.

Kreuzfahrer had arrived as dusk was falling one Nachgeheim evening when the smoky autumn air was thick with the smell of decaying fallen leaves and toadstool spores. He had made straight for the house of Old Gelda, the village wise woman, and dragged her out into the village square. She was accused of witchcraft and consorting with daemons.

Dieter still doubted the validity of the accusations to this day but what made it worse was how the witch hunter had made everyone in Hangenholz turn on Gelda, who had seen to all of their winter ailments and delivered fully half the population of the village as midwife. In order to prove themselves innocent of her corruption, the villagers had to profess the helpless old woman’s guilt with ever-louder voices and more strident accusations.

Gelda, terrified tears streaming down her panic reddened cheeks, had been unable to say anything in her own defence, Kreuzfahrer having already cut out her tongue. Then, in front of his father’s chapel, Dieter had watched the witch hunter tie Gelda to a fence post the blacksmith himself had hammered into the ground, and had her burnt to death, even forcing the village headman to put the blazing torch to the faggots piled around her decrepit body. It was this experience alone that had given Dieter nightmares as a child more than any warning tales of rat-headed men or brutish greenskin raiders ever had. The rest of the village had suspected each other of all manner of heinous crimes after Kreuzfahrer’s visit and as a result, certain families never trusted one another again.

And now one like him had summoned Dieter and called him a heretic!

Dieter dared not disobey the witch hunter. Feeling his blood ran cold in his veins, and his heart beating its own rapid tattoo of panic, he dragged his leaden feet towards the imposing figure of the Brother-Captain Krieger.

Now Dieter could see Professor Theodrus forcing his way into the library behind the towering witch hunter.

“This is preposterous! An outrage!” the guild master blustered. “First you come here practically claiming that we are harbouring a murderer and body-snatcher within our walls—”

“Where do you get the bodies for your studies?” the witch hunter’s grim snarl of a voice interrupted.

“We are not barber-surgeons! We are physicians!” Theodrus bridled. “And now I find you harassing one of our students as if he’s some dangerous criminal!”

Before Dieter’s patron could reach them, Krieger had grabbed Dieter roughly with a grip like an iron vice, clamping down on his arms and holding them tight to his sides. Dieter could feel Krieger’s breath, hot and rancid against his neck.

“Unhand this boy at once!” Theodrus’ face was flushed red with furious indignation and barely-controlled rage, like a caged feral beast struggling to free itself from beneath the professor’s usually composed demeanour.

“Would you stop the work of the Sigmar’s own templar?” Krieger challenged.

“I might have been foolish enough to let you in here in the first place but I’m not that addle-brained!” Theodrus railed. “But might I suggest that we continue this discussion behind closed doors.”

“You wish this interrogation to be carried out somewhere less public?” Krieger fixed the guild master with his piercing icy stare. “Very well. Where?”

“My study. This way.”

Dieter yelped in pain as the witch hunter grabbed him by the arm and forced it up behind his back until he was sure he heard something snap and pain stabbed through his elbow. Then he was frog-marched away.

Before he knew it, Dieter was being forced down into one of the well-upholstered chairs in Professor Theodrus’ study. As the professor closed the door behind them, a jostle of apprentices and guild servants already packing the corridor behind them, the witch hunter took a coil of rope from his belt and lashed both Dieter’s hands roughly to the arms of the chair. Dieter winced and gritted his teeth as the hemp rubbed and cut into the thin flesh of his wrists.

Then the questioning began.

“Where were you on the night of the first Wellentag of last month? And on the seventh night of Nachexen? What brought you to Bögenhafen?”

Krieger’s constant challenges didn’t give Dieter enough time to answer. Then the questions became more personal.

“Why did you leave… Hangenholz, was it? Why did you leave? What guilty secrets did you leave behind you there? Has death always followed in your wake? What of your father? What was it like having a priest of the death-cult for a father?”

Someone’s tongue had obviously been loosened on meeting Brother-Captain Krieger. Dieter wondered who had told the witch hunter about him.

“Morr, preserve me,” Dieter gasped under his breath, panic having gripped him fully.

“What? What was that?” Krieger turned on him. “Why not ‘Sigmar save me’? Was your father a heretic too? Did he teach you his heretical ways?”

“No,” Dieter struggled. “It was never like th—”

“What were you doing on all those long, dark, lonely evenings, whilst your father prepared the bodies of the dead for burial? I expect you used to watch, didn’t you? Watch and learn? How did it make you feel watching him strip the carcasses and wash them, anoint them, enshroud them? Did you become just a little too interested? Morbidly fascinated even? How long have you been practising occult heresies of the most abominable nature, raising the dead by means of foul necromancy?”

The witch hunter clearly wasn’t interested in what this naive country boy had to say. In Krieger’s mind, Dieter was already tried, found guilty, and burning at the stake.

“What made you do it, eh? What drove you first to kill?”

“I… I didn’t k—”

“Did someone disturb you when you were stealing the merchant’s body?”

“A merchant? I didn’t reali—”

“Was it the beggar Hubertus? Is that what happened to him? Did you make him disappear? What did you do with the body? Did you throw it in the Bögen? What did you do with the other bodies? Are you keeping them somewhere? Do they keep you company in the squalid charnel house that you call home?”

Spittle flew from Krieger’s lips into Dieter’s face as his incensed interrogator leaned closer. Dieter said nothing now. He could say nothing in the face of the witch hunter’s constant barrage of questions.

“I can have every house between here and the Langen Strasse searched. But why don’t you just tell me where you’ve dumped them? What will loosen your tongue? Shall I get out the thumbscrews or should I haul you back to the temple to introduce you to Madame Rack?”

Dieter was stunned into silence. It was all happening so quickly. To him the interrogation was passing in a daze, so traumatic was he finding the experience. He had retreated back inside his shell of shyness. He was a child again, back in Hangenholz, before his mother died, before his world ended, before this!

He could well understand why innocent men confessed to all manner of crimes. It wasn’t even just to make the incessant questioning stop. After several hours of this, Krieger could probably make you believe all manner of evils about yourself. And then there was the confessional of the torture chamber where stronger wills than Dieter’s were broken as easily as a hammer breaks an egg.

Dieter might have been cowed into silence, but Professor Theodrus could still speak, and did, in the boy’s defence.

“This stops now!” the guild master roared, slamming his hands down on the top of his desk.

Krieger rose, turning away from Dieter, his sapphire gaze cold as a Mondstille night.

“Why do you defend this wretch?” the witch hunter said, his voice as hard and cutting as a tempered steel blade. “Is it a sign of your own guilt, perhaps?”

“This interrogation is a farce!” Theodrus bellowed. “I would offer any member of this guild the same support in the face of such flagrant lies and fraudulent accusations.”

“Unless they were proved to be a servant of darker powers, of course.”

“Which Heydrich is not!”

“That is yet to be proved.”

“How can this boy be the Corpse Taker? He only arrived in Bögenhafen at the beginning of Nachexen and the disappearances began as far back as last Kaldezeit, as far as we are aware.”

“Bodies have gone missing since, and with increasing regularity.”

“And there is nothing to suggest that these disappearances are the work of anyone other than the Corpse Taker.”

Through the haze of the trauma of his experience Dieter was gradually aware of a needling thought at the back of his mind. Professor Theodrus seemed very well informed regarding the disappearances and the Corpse Taker’s alleged crimes. What part had he played in these events?

He had been master of the physicians’ guild for a good number of years and enjoyed the patronage of many of the market town’s most respected noble families. There would be almost nowhere that he could not go within the town and almost no piece of information that would not be accessible to him, one way or another.

“And how could a youth of meagre means, who grew up in a backwater Reikland village, be able to carry out what it is claimed the Corpse Taker has done?”

“Theodrus, I came to this guild to gather information about events that have beset this town that I might uncover the identity of this foul carrion creature and hunt it down like the mongrel dog the malevolent fiend undoubtedly is. And then I find this heretic skulking in your very midst.”

Krieger turned his crystal-sharp gaze back on the restrained Dieter. “Consider this possibility, professor. Perhaps it is you who is tutoring the apprentice in the ways of dark magic.”

“This is preposterous!” Theodrus’ face was the very picture of fury. “I am calling an end to this farce right now. If you propose to question this student any more, then you had better take him off to your temple and you had better have some proof to back up your wild accusations. Or do I need to remind you of this guild’s influence within Bögenhafen? Now untie the boy at once!”

“Do not dare to threaten me, bloodletter,” the witch hunter growled like a mastiff, a vein pulsing unpleasantly in his neck, “or I shall take you in for questioning along with this wretch,” he said, half-pulling Dieter out of his seat by the scruff of his robes.

“We are not sorcerers here, brother-captain!”

Ignoring Theodrus’ plea Krieger turned his chilling gaze on Dieter again. “Do you realise, Heydrich, that for centuries the proscribed punishment for the practise of this particular heresy was to be burnt at the stake, in agonising torment?”

“I-I did know that, y-yes,” Dieter stammered. To be accused of sorcery was still something that could shame a man, particularly a doktor of physick.

Krieger brought his face even closer to Dieter’s, his eyes wild, burning with the full fury of the retributive inferno. “And in my humble opinion, it still should be. And what is the practice of medicine but one step away from alchemy and that itself is but the first step on the path to the damnation that the study of the magic arts brings. And you, a son of a priest of the death-cult, making a study of the human body. It you ask me you are just a little too well-informed about the frailty of the human form, but obviously not well-informed enough, so you have to continue your study of anatomy by other means.”

“Anatomy is not a subject taught by the guild of physicians,” Theodrus angrily corrected the witch hunter. “As I thought I had already made plain, we are not back-street barber-surgeons, we are members of the most esteemed and venerable guild of physicians. We are men of medicine; men of science.”

“And that in itself is dangerous heresy.”

“Shallya help me, I shall report you to the town council and the elector count’s household myself and have the full might of his armoured fist brought down upon your chapter house!”

For a moment neither the Sigmarite nor the guild master spoke. Dieter saw the men exchange dagger-pointed stares. It was the brother-captain who eventually broke the silence.

“I come from a long family line of witch hunters and warrior priests, and we are proud of our heritage. My great-great-great grandfather scoured Mordheim in the years following the devastation caused by the comet-strike of the Hammer of Sigmar. Mark my words—Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger always gets his man.”

It appeared that a stalemate had been reached but Dieter wondered how long such a status quo would remain.

The witch hunter strode back to the chair to which Dieter was bound. He pulled a gleaming knife from his belt and held it under Dieter’s nose.

“And if you are that man, I will have you excommunicated from the bosom of the Holy Church of Sigmar and then I swear that I will come after you and hunt you down!”

With one sharp motion the witch hunter cut Dieter’s bonds, nicking the flesh of his arm in the process. Krieger turned on his heel to leave. But before he left he had one last warning to offer.

“Remember, I’ll be watching you.”

And then he was gone.

Dieter sagged in the chair where he sat and threw up.

PFLUGZEIT

This Mortal Coil

What is madness? Do you think that I am mad, one who would damn his own soul by practising the black arts? And to what end? For a few more decades of desperate decaying life? To become an outcast from the world of the living when it is precisely an unbearable desire to live that has driven one to study the proscribed rites of necromancy?

I shall tell you for what purpose I have done this. I have done it all for naught, for that is what I have now as I lay my soul bare before you: nothing. Nothing to show for two centuries of life, the lands that I once claimed as my own, the people who paid me fealty, all now forgotten.

And all I have now to look forward to is an ignominious end and an eternity spent in that twilight world of the realm of the dead, trapped between the worlds of eternal rest and glorious life, unable to exist in either, both tantalisingly, torturously out of reach. An eternity of torment. An eternity of damnation.

It has been said that the line between genius and insanity is a fine one and crossed all too easily. It has also been said that a madman sees things more clearly than any other, even more so than a man on his deathbed when suddenly his whole nefarious life is thrown into terrifying clarity for the first time in decades.

In times of insanity look to a madman for guidance. How true that saying is of this Chaos-riddled world in which we live, where nameless horrors forever wait in the darkness, ready to catch us, to trap us, and bring us to eternal ruin.

I believe that madness is an unshackling from the prescribed constraints put on us by the expectations of our culture, our race and most of all, ourselves. A madman does not care what others think of him. For what drives a person to madness is often the revelation that the world around them is not as safe and secure as they might like to believe, that it is a place populated by monsters that lurk just behind the thin veil of reality, that can rend a man’s soul apart as well as his body and destroy his mind.

You might ask whether I am mad?

If I deny it, would that be proof of my madness.

But then, if I were to say that I most certainly am mad, that admission itself would surely suggest that I possessed a sound and reasoning mind.

But I do not claim to be mad. As I have said, the only thing that brings a man a clear-mindedness that even approaches that possessed by the insane, is the knowledge that his own death is near. And I, for one, have accepted that truth, that inevitability.

Ironically, the lunatic does not believe himself to be mad for he sees the world with a clarity the rest of us could only hope for. He sees the world as it really is. For so often it is the realisation that there are horrors barely hidden beneath the surface of this world that drives men to madness. They have seen the world as it really is. And how can such a clear, unsullied view of the world be considered madness?

* * *

Mitterfruhl came and went that year in a haze of drizzle, dampening the spirits of the congregations of Taal and Ulric worshippers who thronged to the town to celebrate the spring equinox. And then Pflugzeit blew in, unseasonably cold but seasonably wet. The relentless overcast skies darkened the mood of everybody in the town, even though the Corpse Taker seemed to have decided to leave the populace alone for the time being. The rain was welcome, however, as it sluiced the slurry out of the streets that had collected in even greater quantities during the three days given over to the Mitterfruhl festival. But Dieter Heydrich had been virtually unaware of any of it.

Following his dire experience at the hands of the witch hunter Brother-Captain Krieger, Dieter had thrown himself into his studies even more than he had done before. He also spent even longer hours in the guild library and then continued with his note-taking late into the night in his garret room, spurning Erich’s offers of an evening’s relaxing entertainment away from his studies. It was as if he was determined to prove that any ability he might have was purely down to diligent labour and nothing more sinister than that. What did it matter that he was a son of a priest of Morr? He had been brought up in a gods-fearing household and he knew full well the difference between right and wrong. He was certainly no bodysnatcher or, Morr forbid, a necromancer!

But that did not change the fact that Dieter had acquired a sinister new nickname, given him by the other students, that of the daemon’s apprentice. Professor Theodrus had also taken pains to distance himself from Dieter. Although Theodrus had initially stood by his star pupil, incensed that Krieger should demonstrate such a flagrant disregard for the establishment of the physicians’ guild, which itself held great power and influence within the town, now that the matter was resolved, for the time being at least, the guild master had decided that to protect his interests he had needed to loosen the bonds between himself and his apprentice.

There had been long-held distrust between the Templar Order of Sigmar and the physicians’ guild. The templars held an almost psychotic hatred for magic users and spell casters—seeing the miracles their own warrior priests performed as exactly that, the divine intervention of the Heldenhammer himself—and considered the potion-brewing physicians as little better than conjurers or alchemists themselves.

So when Leopold offered him the opportunity to visit the Temple of Shallya, only a little further into the town from the guild, Dieter jumped at the chance to further his studies in another setting, no matter how brief that change might be. Here was a chance to prove that he was dedicated to the healing arts rather than a practitioner of the black arts, and at the same time practise his skills on live patients, rather than merely helping the licensed guild members prepare treatments that the qualified physicians would ultimately administer themselves, or simply cleaning up after them in their filthy laboratories.

The infirmary was a surprisingly large, open space that seemed to swallow up the echoes of the footsteps on the flags and absorb the muffled moans of the patients. It had been arranged inside a long hall, the cross-beamed roof the height of a two-storey building. Simple pallet beds lined the whitewashed walls, some separated from the others by wooden screens. The priestesses of Shallya glided between the beds in their dove grey and white gowns with a gold-embroidered heart over the left breast, each woman wearing a wimple that kept her hair hidden and out of the way.

The women ranged in age from young girls, barely out of adolescence, admitted to the temple as novices, to plump old dames, many of whom were widows who had come to the order late in life, after their duties to family were done, as a way of making the last years of their life mean something.

But they all had a calm demeanour about them and a ready smile for those poor souls in their care.

Standing before the two apprentices was Sister Marilda, a tall woman whose age Dieter found it hard to determine. Her face was handsome enough and she held herself with delicate poise and grace that also suggested that when challenged she could be as immovable as a rock in her expectations and attitudes. Dieter and Leopold had been sent to the temple with a letter of introduction from Doktor Kalt, and arrived as the sisters were processing out of matins.

“Good morning, gentlemen, and how may I help you this morning?” Sister Marilda asked. She patently knew they were from the guild and why they were there. Leopold had visited the infirmary-temple before with his master, Kalt. It was merely out of courtesy that she asked.

“Good morning, sister,” Leopold answered confidently, giving the priestess his most winning smile. Dieter stood behind him, trying not to draw attention to himself. “We have been sent here by Doktor Kalt, from the physicians’ guild.”

An apprentice could expect to visit the infirmary of the Temple of Shallya on a semi-regular basis, as part of his training, to help the priestesses tend to the sick. It also provided the medical students with an opportunity to try out new treatments on patients who, on the whole, had no family left to care what happened to them if something went wrong and they did not recover. So many of those in the care of the sisterhood of Shallya were in a state of terminal decline that they had nothing to lose in acting as guinea pigs for the apprentices to practise on, other than perhaps a few days or weeks of miserable life.

“Very good. You must thank Doktor Kalt when you return,” she said matter-of-factly.

“We have brought a new unguent, made from the flower of the meadowflax, for the treatment of open sores and ulcers and to see if there is any other way in which we can help.”

“And your help is much appreciated. There are certainly those who would be grateful for a salve to ease the pain of their afflictions. If you would come this way.”

Sister Marilda led the way across the infirmary, the two students following.

“But of course we must also continue to pray for the absolution of their souls,” Marilda said as she walked, “for you know, of course, that illness and disease are a physical manifestation of sin.”

“Yes, sister, of course,” Leopold agreed, then glancing back over his shoulder at his companion threw Dieter a theatrical wink.

They spent the next two hours cleaning and dressing the suppurating sores and raw flesh-eating ulcers of beggars, the elderly of the town cast upon the Shallyan temple to be ministered to in their final days and even an aging cleric from the temple of Bögenhafen’s patron—a thoroughly unpleasant, foul-mouthed and unappreciative curmudgeon who showed not one ounce of sanctity about his person.

The smell of infection as they worked was appalling, and Dieter was glad of the posy of strong-smelling herbs he carried now in his pocket. Between patients he held the posy close to his nose and inhaled deeply of its heady fragrance, so that it might at least in part mask the stench of putrefaction.

Throughout, Leopold talked to the patients about what he was doing, his manner jovial, and in turn listened to them unburden their hearts about the miseries that their lives had brought them. Dieter was secretly impressed by the way his friend conducted himself and wished he could be more like him. Leopold had obviously known what to expect from his previous visits, but it was more than just that. He had a manner about him more like that of a confessional priest than a doktor, from what Dieter had seen in his short time at the guild.

Sister Marilda approached Leopold and Dieter as they were washing their hands in the bowl the priestesses had provided for them, as the temple bell was chiming the hour of noon. Despite the stench of the work and the repulsive sores they had seen, Dieter could still feel hunger knotting inside his belly and was looking forward to sating his hunger at the Pestle and Mortar.

“Are you gentlemen finished?” Marilda asked demurely.

Leopold straightened from leaning over their last patient’s bed. “Yes, sister,” he said. “Is there something else we can do for you before we go?”

“Yes, there is,” Marilda replied. The image in Dieter’s mind of his next meal was devoured by stomach-gnawing hunger, “Just one more patient who might benefit from your salve. But I must warn you that he is a poor lunatic whose wits have left him.”

“Really?” Dieter suddenly found himself saying, morbidly curious. He had only ever encountered the wandering lunatics and drink and drug-addled vagabonds who could be found in every Imperial town or city, or wandering the highways and byways of the land, some in semi-feral packs. He had spent long hours studying ailments of the body over the past two months. Now here was an opportunity to study a sickness of the mind.

“Yes, his sins weigh heavy upon him,” Marilda said, lowering her eyes and shaking her head sadly.

“What is his name?” Leopold asked, surprised at his friend’s unaccustomed outburst, whilst at the same time being just as fascinated and excited by the prospect of meeting one of the mentally ill.

“His name is Anselm.”

“Anselm,” Leopold repeated. “Is that it? What is his family name?”

“Anselm is all he told us,” Sister Marilda explained. “It might well be all he knows. Come, he is this way.”

Within the harsh world in which the people of the Empire lived, the mentally ill were often forgotten; for the most part a misunderstood, untolerated and feared underclass. Very few places actually existed to make provision for their care. At best they were an embarrassment to their families, to be locked away from the world to save their relations embarrassment as much as for their own protection. At worst the insane were accused of being possessed by daemons and burnt as witches, or were, driven to join crazed Chaos cults in which they found some kind of acceptance. And every once in a while the mentally ill were taken to be divinely inspired messengers of the gods. Such was not the case with the poor wretch Anselm.

He was huddled on a pallet bed in a small cell with a sturdy iron-banded door. Dieter was immediately taken aback. Where the other patients they had attended to were old or at least prematurely aged by the hand life had dealt them, there was no mistaking that Anselm was still a young man, despite the sunken cheeks and hollow-eyed stare. His long hair, hanging in matted knots down as far as his shoulder blades, was prematurely white, making him look older than his years.

“Is it safe?” Dieter asked anxiously, seeing that Anselm was restrained within a harness-like jacket that kept his arms tied tight around his middle, secured with buckles behind so that he could not free himself.

“Oh yes,” assured Sister Marilda. “We had to restrain him to stop him harming himself.”

“Harming himself?” Leopold asked, looking at the bound man.

Dieter looked again too, the red-eyed stare of the madman looking sorrowfully back at him. But his eyes were drawn to infected areas of exposed flesh on the man’s legs, where circles of skin had been peeled away, revealing the raw flesh underneath.

“He did it to himself in his madness,” the priestess said, following Dieter’s gaze. “The sores are where he has pulled the skin away and picked at the scabs. Perhaps your salve might bring him some alleviation from the stinging soreness.”

Marilda turned to leave the cell and fixed both Leopold and Dieter with her suddenly stern gaze. “Pay no heed to anything he tells you,” she said in barely more than a whisper. “His mind is addled and his wits have left him. You would do well to remember that.” And with that she was gone.

Dieter stood looking at the lunatic Anselm, who stared back with an expression of pure terror in his eyes, not knowing quite how to approach this patient. But the ever-confident Leopold knew, of course. He spoke calmingly, and almost incessantly, as he approached the pallet bed, continually explaining to the wretch what he was doing and reassuring him. Dieter attempted to follow his friend’s example. Leopold truly had a way of putting people at their ease, madman and sane man alike.

Anselm shied away from the two of them at first, flinching as Leopold pulled up the torn leg of his britches to inspect the self-inflicted injuries. Then slowly but surely Leopold’s words seemed to have a calming effect on Anselm.

“A-are you from the g-g-guild?”

Hearing the thin, reedy voice so unexpectedly and for the first time made Dieter physically jump and his heart race. He took a step back from the lunatic’s cot, worried what other surprises he might have in store, readily believing that the wretch would attack them at any second, falling on them with gnashing teeth and clawing fingernails, having somehow freed himself of the jacket. But no such thing happened.

Leopold remained calmly where he was, crouched by the bed that he might treat the open sores.

“That’s right, the guild of physicians.”

Dieter looked at Leopold admiringly. He wished he had his friend’s confidence and charisma. But at least he had Leopold’s friendship.

“A-are you doktors? C-can you cure the sick?”

“Not doktors yet; apprentices. But we do try to help those who ail.”

“C-can you cure a man of a lost s-soul?”

Leopold and Dieter looked at one another uncomfortably. Dieter shivered, the skin on his arms prickling with gooseflesh. Was it just him or had the temperature in the damp cell dropped perceptibly?

“I-I was an apprentice, once.”

Dieter fixed the madman with his own inquisitive gaze. “At the physicians’ guild?” he asked.

“Y-yes. That’s right. At the g-guild. Until…” Anselm trailed off.

“Until what?” Dieter pressed.

“Until. N-no, I can’t say. M-mustn’t say.” Anselm drew his legs up, out of Leopold’s tending reach, and started to rock backwards and forwards on his cot. “No, mustn’t say. M-mustn’t say.”

“What is it?” Leopold asked. “What’s the matter?”

“No, can’t say. Mustn’t say. They’ll think you’re mad; mad, I tell you!” The lunatic was starting to babble.

Leopold looked at his friend sharply. “What have you done?” he said accusingly.

“I-I,” Dieter stammered in reply, wrong-footed by first the lunatic’s behaviour and now by his friend’s aggressive change of character, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Mad, I tell you. You can’t tell them. Not about the doktor, not about him, not about what you saw. Physician, heal thyself!”

Who was the madman talking to? To them? To himself? To someone else they couldn’t see, but whose presence Anselm could feel? He certainly wasn’t having trouble finding the words he wanted anymore.

“Which doktor?” Dieter persisted. “A doktor at the guild?”

“You can’t tell them about the doktor. Not about him. He’ll find out. He’ll know. He knows everything. He has your soul.”

Dieter felt the chill even more strongly now. “Which doktor are you talking about?”

“Stop this,” Leopold snapped.

“Which doktor, Anselm?” Hearing his name used for the first time, Anselm looked up, directly at Dieter, fear brimming in his eyes once more.

“Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”

Suddenly the bound lunatic threw himself bodily at Dieter, landing on the cold stone floor in a heap at his feet, grazing his knees and making his interrogator take his own startled jump backwards.

“Cannot say, cannot say, cannot say. He knows everything, everything.”

And then the lunatic’s incoherent babbling devolved into unintelligible screams, the screams of a terrified man who had lost his soul.

Hearing the screams, the priestesses came running. The two apprentices were bustled out of the cell, the two priestesses who had taken their place slamming the cell door behind them. The door did not keep out the heartrending screams of the lunatic, however. They only stopped once the Shallyan nurses had been able to administer a sleeping draught distilled from the valerian herb.

The poor man’s screams had unsettled the rest of the infirmary as they echoed down the draughty stone corridors of the temple-hospice. The great hall was alive with the anxious murmuring of the other patients and the priestesses who tended them.

Leopold marched ahead of Dieter, his anger boiling off him, as they made their way to exit the Temple of Shallya. Then Sister Marilda was before them, like a suddenly materializing apparition in grey and white.

“Sister,” Leopold acknowledged, ever the well-mannered gentleman despite his current mood.

“Gentlemen,” Marilda said, her eyes cold, her lips unsmiling.

Dieter slunk after his companion but then paused and addressed the priestess for the first time. “How did the lunatic Anselm come to be here? What was it that caused him to lose his mind?”

“I told you not to listen to him,” the sister said sternly, her previously friendly demeanour gone. “Is it not enough that he is mad and in need of our prayers? I had thought you had come here to help those who suffered, not to make their suffering worse.”

Then there was nothing more to be said. Dieter would not get the answers he was looking for here.

But Dieter’s curiosity—that most dangerous of things—had been piqued. He was intrigued by the mysterious Anselm and was determined to find out more about him. After all, he had already experienced a darker side to the guild of physicians and wanted to know what could have made Anselm lose his mind so utterly. Perhaps part of him had to know that Anselm’s fate wouldn’t also be his. He would have to looks for answers elsewhere.

Dieter knocked three times on the door to the guild master’s study. For a moment he heard nothing. Was he doing the right thing, coming here, effectively challenging the professor, especially after what had happened? Perhaps the professor wasn’t there at all. Then he heard the single command: “Enter.”

Taking a deep breath Dieter opened the door and stepped into the room beyond, the memory of the last time he had been here still a livid scar in his mind.

Professor Theodrus looked up. “Oh, Heydrich, it’s you,” he said uncomfortably. “I had thought we had come to… er… an arrangement, after the… er… incident.”

“Yes, professor, we had and I-I’m sorry to trouble you,” Dieter looked down nervously at his feet. “B-but there was something I wanted to ask you.”

“What is it you want?”

Dieter clasped his hands tightly behind his back to stop them shaking. “I went to the Temple of Shallya today, to help the sisters in their work. I met a man there, a young man. His name was Anselm.”

A barely-noticeable tic passed across the left side of Theodrus’ face.

“Do you know him, or what caused him to lose his mind?”

“Anselm? Anselm? I don’t recall the name. I don’t know who you could mean,” Theodrus blustered, but his cheeks flushed as he did so.

“H-he said he was once a student of the physicians’ guild,” Dieter pressed on. “It could not have been that long ago. Should I ask one of the other senior members if they know of him?”

“Close the door,” Theodrus said irritably.

Dieter did as he was bid.

“I remember now. Two years ago there was a student here by the name of Anselm: Anselm Fleischer. He was an embarrassment to the guild. It is not something I like to talk about.”

Dieter considered his next words carefully. “He said a doktor had taken his soul.”

The apprentice now saw the colour visibly drain from the master’s face. “You cannot believe anything the wretch says, he has lost his mind.”

Dieter said nothing. The atmosphere in the guild master’s study was tense, the silence becoming unbearable. Dieter was about to excuse himself when Theodrus unexpectedly spoke again, releasing the tension in the room.

“He was a promising student but he abandoned his studies at the guild, without warning; without giving a reason. One day he simply did not turn up to help Doktor Fitzgarten and he stopped coming to lectures.” An almost wistful look had come to the professor’s eyes. “Some of the other students believed that he had become apprentice to a doktor with dangerously progressive ideas, a doktor not licensed by the guild, one practising clandestinely in the town. More than this they did not know.

“Then it was as if he had disappeared completely. Either he had left Bögenhafen or he was dead. Would that he had been.”

“What?”

“He was found months later by a barge captain and his son. He was roaming the Ostendamm, his clothes rags, his body filthy. All he would say, repeating it over and over, was, ‘Physician, heal thyself’.”

“They brought him to the guild. Once we were able to get any sense out of him it soon became apparent that his memory was like Wissenland chesse, full of holes. He could tell us that his name was Anselm but the name Fleischer meant nothing to him. He could not tell us how he came to be wandering the Ostendamm, nor did he know any of us at the guild, even though he knew he had studied there himself.”

Dieter realised that he was staring at Theodrus aghast.

“It truly is a tragic tale. Whatever had happened to him in the lost months had robbed him of his sanity. His wits had left him.”

“So you sent him to the Temple of Shallya.”

“He could not even clean up after himself anymore. The matter had become… difficult; the guild’s reputation might become tarnished. The guild makes an annual donation to the temple’s collection box for his keep.”

Dieter did not know what to say. Each question answered merely raised a dozen more. “It is a truly tragic tale,” was all he could manage.

“I don’t think you need mention this to any of the other apprentices, do you?”

“N-no, professor.”

“Very good. We have an understanding again then.”

“Yes.”

“Now, will there be anything else?”

“No, professor.”

This consultation was most definitely over.

It was on Aubentag, the seventeenth day of Pflugzeit, that the news reached Dieter that his father was dying.

On that day the sky was the grey of a burial shroud, with the threat of rain never fulfilling its promise. The message found him at the guild at noon, the messenger having been pointed in that direction by Frau Keeler. It was written in his sister’s hand and uncharacteristically brief. Things were dire indeed.

Conflicting emotions raged through Dieter as he bundled his notebooks into his scrip, along with several jars of herbs and treatments he had helped produce. Then he excused himself from Doktor Hirsch’s company. He knew that he had to return home to Hangenholz immediately. It was his duty. His dear sister Katarina needed him. His father was dying. He only hoped he would reach Hangenholz in time.

In the corridor outside Hirsch’s chamber Dieter collided with Leopold Hanser.

He had not seen Leopold since the incident at the Temple of Shallya. They had hardly spoken after leaving the temple. Leopold had seen a new side to his friend, that day, and it was not a side he had liked.

As a consequence Dieter had kept himself more and more to the lodging house in Dunst Strasse or the guild, preferring to move about the town by daylight and even then where the streets were busy and crowded. Dieter still felt vulnerable travelling alone, following his interrogation at the hands of Brother-Captain Krieger.

“I’m sorry,” Dieter said, picking up his dropped scrip.

Leopold saw the look in his friend’s eyes. “Dieter, what’s the matter?” he asked, genuine concern softening the words.

“It’s my father. He’s dying.”

Leopold gasped and looked crestfallen. “Then it is I who am sorry.”

Dieter returned briefly to his lodgings to collect a change of clothes and his travelling cloak, retrieve his full purse from its hiding place behind a loose brick in his garret room, and to leave a message for Erich with Frau Keeler. The large woman gave him a motherly smile and touched his arm. Dieter drew away sharply, uneasy with the physical contact—no one had touched him like that since his mother died, other than his sister—but he managed to return her smile weakly.

His scrip full, Dieter made his way to the Reisehauschen on the Bergstrasse, arriving just in time to buy passage on the last carriage of the day, leaving at two hours past noon, heading out on the Nuln road. He would have to change at the coaching stop of Vagenholt but he could still be in Hangenholz within three days, Morr willing.

Hangenholz didn’t look any different to how he had last seen it, other than then, almost three months earlier, it had still been in the grip of winter. Now the snow was gone from the fields, replaced by healthy stalks of oats and barley, and the iron-hard frosts had gone, leaving the packed earth of the road softer underfoot. But the steeple of the chapel still showed over the thatched roofs of the houses, the backdrop of the woods behind, and the mill with its slow-turning waterwheel by the bridge before the village. Beyond them all atop the blasted tor of Raven’s Crag was the ruined tower that watched over the village like some sinister sentinel.

Dieter paused as he approached the Highwayman’s Oak and looked up at the ancient, rusted cage creaking there from its thick knot of rope that was as black and mildewed as the gibbet cage was red and rusted, the lock and shackles corroded fast, never to be opened again.

And from inside the cage the grinning corpse face of Old Jack, Black Jack, smiled down at Dieter.

All the children of the village knew the mouldering skeleton. None were afraid of Jack for the skeleton was so unlike a living creature what was there to fear? A blackened, lichen-covered skeleton, slumped in its cage. He was like an old friend to them. It had been so long since the skeleton had been interred within the rusted cage that few in the village had ever known the corpse’s real name or why he had been left to die inside the sorrow cage of the gibbet. He had probably been just another highwayman—and given his title to the tree—captured and made to pay for his crimes in the harshest way possible as a warning to any other would-be bandits who would practise their wanton trade on the highways and byways of the Reikland.

But to the children of Hangenholz Old Jack had almost been seen as their protector, who guarded the cluster of peasant holdings from the predations of the wider world. There were always rumours of darker things that roamed abroad in the forests of the northern lands of the Empire and from the south came stories of degenerate green-skinned goblins and their ilk raiding out of the Grey Mountains. Yet Hangenholz seemed to have been spared any such troubles for as long as any could remember. And to the children’s minds, that had been thanks to Old Jack and his watch over the one road into the village, rather than the tireless work of the roadwardens in the employ of the notoriously stringent local lord.

There had been a gibbet there for many a year. The custom of carrying out hangings from the tall oaks in the woods dating from times long past—some said even harkening back to the practices of the pagan tribes people who had lived here before the time of Sigmar—had lent its name to the village. Without the hangings there would have been no village. Without the villains’ deaths there would have been no life for the people here.

It lent an austere, matter-of-fact quality to the people who lived in Hangenholz, who even in the enlightened age of Magnus the Pious following the repulsion of the great incursion from the north, still offered their prayers at the chapel of Morr, rather than at the overgrown way-shrine of Sigmar.

Rather than continue along the main trackway into the village, Dieter turned off the road onto a well-trodden footpath that cut across the fields of green barley. The shortcut was one he had often used as a child and he took it now, passing a crow-pecked turnip-headed scarecrow. He crossed the millstream via the footbridge downstream of the mill which carried the main road into the village to the square.

The priest’s house stood to the left of the chapel, the quiet, painstakingly tended graveyard of Morr’s field spreading out within the circle of a low dry stone wall to the north-west. It had always been a house in mourning but it was never more so than now. Dieter was half aware of villagers about their morning business muttering to each other conspiratorially as they caught sight of the prodigal returning home, but he had other things on his mind. His sister was standing at the door to the house, her eyes red and puffy, the wrung out rag of a handkerchief clenched in her hands.

Brother and sister embraced, and Katarina poured out her grief to Dieter. Then Dieter made his way directly to their father’s spartan room.

Albrecht Heydrich lay unconscious under the blankets of his bed looking for all the world like a corpse laid out in its burial shroud. A cold hand squeezed Dieter’s stomach whilst hot tears stung his eyes. Whatever else he might be feeling, this old man was his father and as the priest’s son he had a duty to the failing old man. But more than that Dieter was an apprentice physician now, a doktor in the making, and Albrecht Heydrich, priest of Morr, was his patient.

Dieter ministered at his father’s bedside for two days, forgoing food and rest. In all that time his father—his patient—did not regain consciousness, no matter what manner of herbal concoction or remedy the physician’s apprentice tried. It was on the third day that Albrecht Heydrich gave up his personal struggle with the god of death, and died.

For those three days Albrecht had been able to say nothing. Dieter simply said goodbye.

That night, Dieter laid his father’s body in the mortuary chapel himself, yet as he looked at the corpse lying there on the mortuary slab of the chapel it was not his father he saw, but his mother. He kept vigil himself, falling asleep on the cold stone floor before the chime of midnight, huddled in a black cowled robe that had been his father’s.

Engels Lothair arrived the next morning from Gabelbrucke to the news that the old priest had passed on into Morr’s realm himself at last. The news was not unexpected. He came to the mortuary chapel to find that his services were not required. Dieter had already prepared his father’s body for burial, washing it with herbs and anointing it with holy oils, knowing the ceremony as if he had trained as a priest of Morr himself, having seen his father carry it out a hundred times; it was as second nature to him. But then he had been surrounded by funerary rites and customs his whole life up to the age of eighteen. He was, as Engels Lothair said his father’s son.

All that remained was for Engels to bless the body before its interment in the cold ground of Morr’s field. Josef Wohlreich, Katarina’s elderly suitor, dug the grave.

Only Dieter and Katarina attended the brief funeral service, which was taken by Engels with the sexton Josef standing by. The threatening clouds gave up their rain at last, as if Morr himself mourned the passing of his servant, even if no one else in Hangenholz publicly did. Albrecht had been a black-hearted old curmudgeon after all, and Dieter would be the first to admit it.

The day of the funeral had been and gone, and Dieter had shed no more tears. Katarina, on the other hand, was devastated. Keeping house for her father, shunned by most of the villagers for being the priest’s flesh and blood, might not have been much of a life but it had been the only life she had known for so many years. And at this time of crippling grief she clung to it still.

But Dieter’s soul was troubled too. For what seemed like his whole life he had wanted to become a healer, that he might alleviate the suffering of others. It had become the sole purpose in his life. It was his reason for being and now he had failed to fulfil the vow he had sworn himself. And if he was a failure in his chosen profession, then his life meant nothing. Medicine was as much a vocation to him as service to Morr had been to his father.

Perhaps things might have been different if he had somehow reached Hangenholz sooner, if he had tried a different cure, if he had not lacked the necessary skills to revive his feather, if he had been a better physician. Despite all the hours of study, it had not been enough. Perhaps it was the old methods that had failed him. It was as if he had been as impotent to prevent his father’s death as he had been to do anything to save his mother all those years before, the very failure that had set him on the path to become a physician.

Perhaps it was the practice of medicine that needed to find another way. Perhaps the guild’s tried and tested methods were now out-dated and not progressive enough if he were to be able to ease people’s suffering and save them. But whatever the case, Dieter himself had been found wanting, and however he set about achieving it, if his life was to be of any consequence whatsoever, he had to train harder, put in longer hours, and become a better doktor. And to do that he had to learn as much as he possibly could, so that the same thing would not happen again. He had to return to Bögenhafen and, for the time being at least, the physicians’ guild.

Dieter’s suggestion that Katarina return with him was met with a furious refusal. Now sixteen, she acted as much the part of widow as that of grieving daughter. But then she was filled with remorse and kissed her brother and said that she would be thinking of him every day, looking forward to the day when he would return.

At that moment Dieter vowed, once again, that he would return to the village of his birth when he had finished his studies, and practise medicine there. No longer would their family name be synonymous with death in Hangenholz; he would make it a new association with life!

Dieter spent the subsequent week in Hangenholz putting their father’s affairs in order. But on the thirty-second of the month, the day before Dieter was due to return to Bögenhafen, he received a shock almost as momentous and life-changing as that of his father’s death, when the Notary Wilhelm Krupster knocked on the door of the Heydrich house.

It appeared that the life of a priest of Morr, being responsible for the offerings made to the temple of Morr, was not without its benefits. His father had been a frugal man; those of an unkind disposition might even have said miserly.

But their father’s frugality was now to prove of benefit to his orphaned offspring. Dieter found himself master of his father’s fortune, a not inconsiderable amount of money. So, having made sure that his sister was comfortably accommodated for, he set off for Bögenhafen the following morning, on the last day of Pflugzeit, considerably better off than he had been when he’d arrived in Hangenholz.

Now he was a man of means and life in decadent Bögenhafen had taught him that there was little that money could not buy, even with regards to knowledge. And it was a well-known tenet that with knowledge came power; the power to determine the course of one’s life rather than be tossed about on the fickle currents of fate. With money to his name, a man might remake his world.

SIGMARZEIT

The Corpse Takers

I have always wondered why it is that the living so fear the dead. Why do people fear the soulless cadavers? What reason can there be? Unless the dead have been given back some mocking semblance of life by a necromancer’s conjurations, what can they do? What danger can they possibly pose? How can they threaten a person of living, breathing flesh and blood?

And also, why do people fear body snatchers so? If they believe that their eternal souls go on to a better place after they die, what does it matter what happens to the rotting husk that was once their body? Why should they care?

The dead should not be feared for there is much the living can learn from them. It could be argued that if it were not for the resurrection men then medical science’s understanding of the human body and its ailments could not have advanced as far as it has. But then the same could be said of the necromantic arts.

But is the truth of it that society’s fear of those who despoil graves and desecrate charnel houses is born of their doubts regarding their supposed faith? Is it because they secretly do not believe what they are taught in temples and chapels throughout the principalities and provinces of the Empire? Is their fear really born of the failing that they really believe that there is nothing beyond this existence, except a horrific eternity in the grave, and anything that would disturb that would merely make that hellish non-existence infinitely worse?

The stagecoach rattled and rumbled through the encroaching Sigmarzeit night, the lanterns swinging at the corners of its roof beside the driver’s seat seeming to leave trails of flickering flame behind them in the deepening darkness. The driver, Gustav Haltung, was hunched over the reins, his travelling cloak wrapped tight about him, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down tightly over his head. The seasons might be on the turn again, but the nights still bore spring’s chill touch.

The coach sped along the rutted road between the shadows of trees encroaching on the track. It passed a roadside milestone that, if it had been light enough to see, the driver would have read in lichen-patterned carved gothic letters that there were only two miles remaining to Bögenhafen.

Gustav lashed the panting pair of horses with the reins and a shout of, “Yah!” The animals’ hooves drummed against the compacted surface of the road, beating their own tattoo in counterpoint to the creaks and groans of the carriage itself. They were on the home stretch and Gustav didn’t want anything befalling them now that they were so close to their destination.

He was eager to reach the safety of the town as quickly as possible. It didn’t do to be out after dark, if it could be helped, even in this pocket of civilisation of the Reikland. If it hadn’t have been for the pale, intense young man’s added incentive, he would have stopped at Vagenholt for the night and finished the last leg of the journey to Bögenhafen the next morning.

Beneath the driver’s position, a glimmer of lantern light escaped the inside of the carriage from between the thick, moth-eaten velvet drapes drawn shut across its windows, barely even hinting at the discomfort the customers of the Four Seasons Company might be suffering within.

The lantern hanging from the roof of the coach’s interior swung crazily as the vehicle bounced along the road, throwing wild shadows across the faces of the passengers.

Just as the last time he had travelled to Bögenhafen, Dieter was not the only passenger on board the stagecoach, although this time it was he who had paid the driver the tip to get them back to the town as quickly as possible. He had tarried too long in Hangenholz; he would be getting behind with his studies. Hence it was that rather than stop at the staging post hamlet, they had kept on into the encroaching dark towards Bögenhafen.

Sitting opposite Dieter was a man of law clutching a scratched and scuffed leather satchel, not unlike Dieter’s own battered scrip. The lawyer was well into middle age, his beard grey and teased to a point. He had apparently been summoned from Altdorf to defend a merchant accused of unnatural and debauched acts by the Templars of Sigmar.

Sitting next to Dieter was a man in his late twenties who appeared to be a collection of contradictions. He looked like he might very well have come from aristocratic stock but he travelled with the minimum of luggage and had no servant in attendance. He appeared to be a dandy for he wore the clothes of the latest fashion—a frill-wristed shirt, tightly fitting, gold-buttoned doublet, red velvet duelling cape, linen trousers and calfskin boots—but the blade he carried at his waist was a heavy, soldier’s sword and certainly no duelling rapier. The dandy wore his hair in a ponytail tied back with a ribbon and had a close-cropped, carefully-cultivated goatee beard, but his face bore the scars of a life lived at the rough end, on the borders of civilisation or even beyond them. He looked like he would be equally at ease within the Imperial court as he would be battling trolls at the World’s Edge Mountains.

Dieter had not ventured to discover any more about his fellow passengers beyond what little he had gleaned by their appearance and what information they had volunteered themselves. When the lawyer had asked the black-robed, pale young man with unkempt, raven-dark hair and an intense look in his eyes what his business was in Bögenhafen, Dieter had replied simply, and honestly, that he was a student of the physicians’ guild there. He had offered no more.

For the most part, Dieter was lost in his own thoughts as he tried to resolve the many different conflicting thoughts and feelings raging within him. It was still only twelve days since his father had died and Dieter was still in mourning—as much for his sister’s loss as for the hole that he felt had opened up inside him.

It had been three days since he had left Hangenholz and, with the second day of Sigmarzeit coming to an end, he was almost back in Bögenhafen where he could put behind him all that had happened over the last two weeks. For back in Bögenhafen he could pretend that nothing had happened at all.

Gustav peered into the night from beneath the brim of his hat. The walls of the town rose out of the darkness, black against the velvet blue of night, their battlements limned with moonlight.

Half a mile away to his right he thought he saw the orange flicker of lantern light, but in that direction there lay only the town cemetery. Perhaps Morr’s priest was working late this night, preparing another body for burial; there would certainly be a steady stream of townsfolk requiring his attentions and blessings before they made their final journey into Morr’s twilight kingdom.

Then, the gleam of metal on the road ahead of the coach. Two figures, both on foot, were standing in the middle of road. Gustav’s heart skipped a beat. But then a calm warmth passed through his agitated body. They were flagging the stagecoach down and, as the carriage neared them, Gustav could see that they were wearing the uniforms of Imperial roadwardens: armoured hauberks and visor-helms over leather jerkin and britches. Practically level with them now, he could also see that one of them was holding a warhammer casually over his shoulder. The other had an unsheathed sword in his right hand.

Gustav reined in the sweating horses. “Evening, officers,” he said, smiling nervously. “What can I do for you on a night like this?”

The squatter and sturdier of the two patrolmen, the one with the sword, sauntered up to the stagecoach and the driver’s position, whilst his companion approached from the other side, hefting the heavy hammer in both hands.

“I don’t know if it’s so much what you can do for us,” the roadwarden said in a lazy voice, “as what your passengers can do for us.”

It was only then that Gustav noticed how poorly fitting the wardens’ uniforms were and how tarnished, and ill-cared for, their armour.

“Driver, why have we stopped?” a voice came from inside the carriage. Gustav recognised it as the man of law’s.

“Now you just get down and don’t cause us any trouble and we’ll let you live.” The highwayman raised his sword and poked it at Gustav.

The coach driver glanced to his left at the taller of the two opportunist scoundrels who was getting closer to the carriage door on the other side.

“What sort of cargo are you carrying tonight then?” the talkative highwayman asked. His tone was unpleasantly jovial and he treated Gustav to a broken, gap-toothed smile. The tip of his sword never wavered from its position at his stomach.

Gustav said nothing in reply. Deep down he had known that he should have stopped at Vagenholt. He shouldn’t have travelled at night, not without an additional guard on the coach. He would be lucky to keep his job now, that was if he even escaped from this with his life. He needed to do something about the situation and quickly.

“Why don’t we just take a little look, eh?” The more gangly of the highwaymen snickered and, adjusting his grip on the hammer, put a hand to the handle of the carriage door.

Dieter turned his head to the left as all inside the carriage heard the door open. The dandy, who was closest to that side of the carriage, put a hand to the sword sheathed at his side.

The door was opened fully and the ugly, stubble-bristled face of a roadwarden appeared in the space beyond.

“Well, well, what have we here?” the patrolman slurred.

“Look here, what’s going on?” the lawyer demanded.

Dieter wasn’t able to answer that question but there was certainly something not quite right about this roadwarden patrol, they could all sense the wrongness of it.

“Ambush!” the driver’s voice came down from the roof of the carriage above them, confirming all their suspicions.

Then several things happened very quickly, within seconds of each other.

Without saying a word the gentleman swordsman was suddenly out of his seat. He grabbed the carriage door with both hands and yanked it shut. Startled, the roadwarden himself let go and stumbled forwards, the weight of the warhammer in his other hand helping to unbalance him.

An instant later, the soldier of fortune forced the door open again, ramming it directly into their would-be robber’s face. Dieter thought he heard a crack as the man’s nose broke.

There was a shout of “Yah!” and the pistol-crack of leather reins being cracked.

The swordsman was half through the door, ready to finish the idiot highwayman, when the carriage lurched forward again, the horses neighing in distress. Wrong-footed and sent off balance himself, sword now in hand, the man fell headlong out onto the road.

The lawyer gasped and leant forward as if to help the other. Dieter, who was already half out of his seat, fell backwards, his elbow hitting the door handle behind him and pushing it down. That door then opened too and Dieter tumbled backwards out of the coach. Fortunately for him he landed on the soft verge at the edge of the road, rather than the harder, stonier surface of the highway itself.

His scrip, which he still clutched reassuringly to himself, came with him. Dieter rolled over amidst thick tufts of grass, wet with night-dew, ending up almost on his knees. The turf was soft beneath his feet and hands as he pushed himself up into a crouch.

The coach rumbled away down the road before coming to an abrupt halt again. Slowly and yet with the inevitability of a felled tree, the coach driver toppled out of his seat and crashed onto the road; doing nothing to break his fall. He lay there motionless. The sword-wielding brigand was still standing where the coach had been moments before, his blade now held at his side as if he had just made a thrust with it, looking at his victim’s body.

Dieter knew that the driver was dead. Having goaded the horses forward to get the stagecoach and its passengers away from the bogus roadwardens, the highwayman had lunged at the driver, managing to deliver a fatal blow. And then, just like that, the poor wretch was dead. The driver’s brave attempt at facilitating an escape had resulted in his own premature death.

Dieter could hear the lawyer, still inside the carriage, yelping in fear and panic. The bandit could hear him too. He jogged over to the now stationary coach and then disappeared from view as he climbed on board. Dieter heard loud protests followed by an angry muffled exchange, which finished abruptly with a chilling womanly scream. Dieter closed his eyes tight, a cold chill seeping through his body, biting his own tongue to stop himself crying out in terror as well. The killer had added another coldblooded murder to his list of crimes.

The terrified physician’s apprentice opened his eyes again. If he kept them shut for too long it could spell his own end. A ragged shroud of cloud moved away from the face of the moon Mannslieb, bathing the scene on the road in its unearthly, silvery light.

Across the road from him, Dieter could see the swordsman sprawled in the dirt. The leaner bandit wobbled over him, blood pouring in a thick dribble from his nose, still unsteady on his feet, reeling from the blow to the face he had received. The dandy swordsman appeared to be injured as well. He was having trouble moving one leg—had he twisted his knee, or sprained it?—and couldn’t get to his feet. At the same time he was trying to bring his sword to bear, to defend himself as the brigand was still managing to raise the hammer above his head, ready to strike.

Dieter froze, laying himself flat in the long wet grass at the side of the road. No matter how skilled at arms he might be with his sword or how many foes and horrors he might have bested in his life, an unhappy accident and cruel fate were going to bring about his demise. The only one who could do anything to help him now was him, and he was too terrified to do anything.

The hammer crashed down. Dieter heard the sickening crunch quite clearly.

The cry the swordsman gave out was like that of a wounded animal rather than a sound that Dieter would have thought a human being was capable of making.

Dieter felt his gorge rise in his mouth. He swallowed hard, trying to keep the contents of his stomach down. The swordsman rolled over onto his back, holding up the broken mess of his sword arm, the hand flopped backwards, the fingers twitching spasmodically. The man’s sword lay on the road out of reach, useless.

The hammer descended again. The man’s cries were cut off.

Adrenaline suddenly filled Dieter’s body. He knew that he had to do something or he would be a dead man too. Between them the brigands had already killed three times; they wouldn’t hesitate to do so again.

On his feet now, Dieter moved at a lolloping run across the grass, away from the road, keeping low as the ground dropped down to form a natural ditch, and into the shelter of the trees of the spur of woodland that edged the road as it ran parallel to Bögenhafen.

But he did not stop there. He scrambled over the bank formed of knotted root boles, catching his robe on a broken branch tip and tearing the heavily woven fabric, as panicking he pulled himself free. His pulse was almost a throbbing pain in his ears, his heart straining against his ribcage.

He could hear the men on the road behind him. They were arguing already, as was the way of thieves and murderers, but not over their ill-gotten spoils.

Dieter paused, his lungs heaving, and cautiously peered over the lip of the ditch.

“There was another one!” Dieter could hear one of the bandits shouting at his partner-in-crime.

The other’s voice was muffled and incomprehensible, the sound distorted by his broken nose.

“Where did he go?” the first bandit was saying. “Khaine’s teeth! We can’t let him get away.”

Dieter could see the thickset brigand, clearly outlined by the moonlight, peering towards the trees. He ducked down immediately. He could not understand the other’s reply.

“The watch will be sniffing around here in no time at all. We can’t let that bastard get to them.”

Then Dieter was off again, his robe flapping around his legs as he heard the brigands’ feet running along the road towards Bögenhafen. He ran as though Morr’s disaffected brother the god of murder himself were after him. For if he was caught by the murdering impostor roadwardens, it might as well be Khaine at his heels, for it would be the patron of murderers and assassins who would feast on his damned soul.

Dieter sprinted across the rough, uneven ground as fast as his legs could carry him, his breathing frantic and ragged, his feet slipping on the wet, spongy turf or tripping in unseen rabbit holes and gulleys in the darkness.

His mind raced as he ran. Following a sudden outburst of violence which couldn’t have lasted more than a minute, three lives had been taken. Three men were dead.

How dare the brigands attack so close to the town? The audacity of it! But then how dare they attack at all? How could they commit murder so coolly? How could they do such a thing if they had a conscience? Morr take their souls, the devils!

Dieter reached the edge of the garden of Morr, skidding to an abrupt stop against the dry-stone wall. But he didn’t stop there. The wall wasn’t high and it was no effort for him to scale it, even with his scrip still in his hands, and climb over into the gardens beyond.

As he recovered his breath he took stock of his situation once again. With each great lungful of chilled night air he inhaled, so his racing mind became calmer and his thinking more logical. He doubted very much that the murdering highwaymen would keep up their pursuit for very long, not with the risk of being pursued themselves by the watch an imminent concern in their own minds. Neither did he think that they would think to look for him in the gardens of Morr, for most people wouldn’t think of a graveyard, a place of the dead, as a safe place to be after dark. But then Dieter Heydrich, son of a priest of Morr, wasn’t most people.

It was only as he squatted, hunkered down on the cemetery side of the wall, straining his ears for anything more from the brigands, that Dieter became aware of the flickering lamplight, painting the tombstones behind him with a lambent orange glow. Keeping himself crouched low, Dieter turned his head and carefully surveyed the enclosed plot, feeling his pulse rate rising again.

Dieter had entered the garden close to its eastern corner. The mortuary chapel stood a good fifty yards away between the sullen yew trees and grand mausoleums of Bögenhafen’s noble merchant families. Like so many graveyards across the Empire it had been here a long time. There had probably been some sort of burial ground here since before the founding of Bögenhafen, when the first settlement at this point of the River Bögen had grown up, and parts of its two-acre plot had become neglected and fallen into disrepair.

But between him and the chapel of Morr, their work obscured by the lines of tumbled grave markers, Dieter could see two men busy in the graveyard, watched by the silent yew trees.

So engrossed were they in their work that they did not seem to have heard the confrontation on the road half a mile away, and they certainly weren’t aware of Dieter’s presence in the cemetery. One was tall and thickset, with hulking shoulders and thickly muscled arms. His associate was short and stocky, but something about the way he was putting a pickaxe to good use also suggested that there was greater strength in his stout frame.

From what Dieter could make out between the stones, and from the skittering, scraping sounds he could hear, it was clear to him that the two men were busy digging, but were they digging a new grave, or breaking open an old one?

The yews made sinister clawing shapes against the velvet backdrop of the clear night. The combination of Mannslieb’s silvery light and the flickering illumination of the lantern the men had placed on the ground close to where they were working only served to make the trees appear even more forbidding.

For a moment, Dieter almost forgot about the highwaymen’s pursuit, so intrigued was he by what was taking place in front of him in the graveyard. It could be that he was simply watching the town sexton and his assistant about their work but something else, something that resonated with him as Albrecht Heydrich’s son, felt that these men could hardly be up to any good. Why go about their business at night otherwise? And he had heard of men such as these before; grave robbers, body snatchers, resurrection men. Unearthing the bodies of the dead for other equally nefarious individuals, providing them with the raw materials to carry out their macabre and possibly heretical experiments. Corpse takers.

What was it about this night that so many felons were compelled to carry out their despicable business at this time? Dieter glanced at the heavens. Mannslieb shone silently down on all that was coming to pass beneath him but, it being only a month since the spring equinox, the ominous face of Morrslieb was barely visible in its erratic cycle.

The shorter of the two grave thieves had now got into the hole the two were excavating. Dieter thought he heard a splintering crack and then more sounds like that of mouldering wooden planks being worked apart. Pickaxe and spade were downed and then, with a lot of huffing and puffing, the shorter man heaved something up out of the hole. His burden was taken by the taller, broader man who effortlessly hefted the object out of the pit and onto the pile of earth that had been created by their exertions next to it. The tall man then helped his companion up out of the hole and they both picked up the object between them.

Dieter could hardly believe what he was seeing. At first he tried to convince himself that it was only a sack that they were carrying in an ungainly manner between them. But when the worm-eaten remains of a grey-fleshed arm flopped out of the side of the muddy, cloth bundle, Dieter’s suspicions were confirmed. The macabre felons had exhumed a corpse from its alleged final resting place. And indeed they had put it inside a sack, making some semblance of an effort to hide the evidence of the blasphemous activities.

The body snatchers laid the sackcloth bundle on a hand-drawn cart they had positioned close to the grave they were desecrating. Dieter moved forward carefully and quietly to get a better view. The two men picked up their tools again and quickly filled in the now empty grave. Once they were done, they stowed their tools on the cart as well. As the shorter of the two recovered the lantern and closed its shutters, the larger man took up his position between the traces of the cart and began pulling it over the uneven lawns of the cemetery. The body snatchers were heading towards the northern edge of the garden.

Dieter knew immediately what he should do. It was his duty, as a Morr-fearing man, to report these two ghoulish villains to the town authorities. Their kind was an abomination in Morr’s presence. And where was the resident priest of Morr whilst grave robbing was taking place in the land that it was his responsibility to tend? Perhaps Dieter’s first action should be to find Father Hulbert and alert him to the crime-taking place here, under his very nose.

But Dieter also knew that this business wasn’t finished yet. Where were the body snatchers taking the corpse? Why had they picked on this poor soul’s grave in particular? Who was the one paying them to commit this terrible crime? Was the Corpse Taker back to practising his evil ways? Dieter’s report would be of more use to the watch or the religious authorities the more he could tell them. He might even be able to implicate any others involved in this law breaking.

Skulking between the skull-carved crypts and broken tombstones, Dieter cautiously followed the two body snatchers. They continued to lead him north across the garden and thanks to the clearness of the night, he saw that they were leading him towards a gap in the cemetery wall where the dry stone wall had collapsed. The cart bumped over the rubble as the two men manhandled it through the space. Then they proceeded to follow the towering town wall, hidden in its looming, pitch-black shadow, towards the river still a good two hundred and fifty yards away, gurgling its way through the town.

Dieter stopped again at the hole in the cemetery wall. In all the time that he had been observing the grave robbers, Dieter had not heard them speak once. These were men used to working clandestinely and not drawing attention to themselves. They had given him no clue as to where they were going. If they were making their way to the river, for all he knew they might be heading for a destination downstream and not one in the town at all. He would follow them for just a little longer. He had completely forgotten about the attack on the road that had led him into this curious and slightly sinister situation.

Just a little further, Dieter thought, as he came in sight of the river and saw the flat-bottomed skiff moored there, tethered to a willow leaning out over the river. Dieter would not have considered himself a particularly brave individual but he had a duty to fulfil here; he was the only one who had witnessed the exhumation and subsequent corpse-theft.

Just a little further, Dieter thought, as he watched the two men punt the boat upstream, with the body now aboard, past the edge of the high, crenellated town wall towards Bögenhafen’s night-muffled docks.

Before he had fully thought through the implications of what he was doing; Dieter found himself up to his knees in water and river-mud, hugging his scrip to his chest with one hand as he used the other, which was also clutching his shoes, to steady himself against the river bank. He then circumnavigated the end of the town wall, creeping into Bögenhafen through the river gate. Paradoxically he felt like some kind of felon himself for doing so. And if Dieter was honest, it was not so much his sense of justice that kept him following the body snatchers but his own irrepressible curiosity.

The trail led onwards. Dieter’s quarry moored their boat to a stone post on the brick-shored edge of the docks and between them hauled the shrouded body out of the skiff. An eerie mist was rising off the river, its creeping tendrils oozing across the docks and filling the streets, obscuring buildings and smothering the sounds of the sleeping town. Once they were both on the dockside themselves, the taller man slung the body unceremoniously over his shoulder and with the shorter grave robber leading the way, they scuttled off down a darkened alleyway that passed between two boarded warehouses.

Unseen by the men, Dieter hauled himself out of the foetid stinking mud of the river’s shore, clambering up a ladder at the end of a wooden slatted jetty, and followed them into the dark mouth of the alley. The adrenaline was racing in his veins again, just as it had when he had found his life in jeopardy on the Nuln road. But where before he had felt terrified, fearing for his life, now it was almost as frighteningly down to the sheer rush of excitement.

Dieter following the corpse takers through the mist-shrouded town, taking care to keep out of sight and never get too close, ducking into concealing doorways and winding side-streets whenever he could, but at the same time making sure that he did not lose sight of them himself in the disorientating fog. And like those he was pursuing, Dieter did as little to draw attention to himself as possible.

The two body snatchers led Dieter on a twisting, circuitous tour of the town until he was totally lost, the thickening mists helping to change Bögenhafen’s previously familiar appearance. The trail eventually came to an end in a part of town that Dieter was certain that he didn’t know, where he had never been before. It was one of the poorer, more rundown parts, of that he could hardly be mistaken. Dieter watched as the grave robbers stopped outside an unremarkable town house with a plain facade. In fact, from the appearance of the outside of the building, it looked like the house had been abandoned. Its windows were shuttered but, to Dieter, it was like staring into the lifeless eye-sockets of a skull. They made it look like the building itself had died.

Dieter glanced up at the street sign opposite his position hidden at the corner of the last alley the two men had led him down. It was just visible through the grey-dark murk. It read Apothekar Allee.

Positioned as it was on the River Bögen, the land the town had been built on was predominantly flat. The ground did rise gently beyond the artisans’ quarter and in the area of the Adel Ring, where the richest of the town citizens resided. In poorer parts of the town the street level rose where houses and warehouses had been built over the ruins of previous buildings, the rooms of those remaining ruins having been absorbed, becoming cellars and secret, sealed rooms. Apothekar Allee was one such area.

Dieter continued to watch as the shorter of the two men looked about him furtively, aware that others might be observing their skulduggery. It seemed to him that the man’s eyes met his for a brief second, but then the body snatcher looked away again. Dieter ducked back out of sight, his heart pounding in his chest. Had the man seen him? Was he at this very moment coming after him like the highwaymen had done? Dieter had to know.

He peered back around the end of the alleyway, legs ready to run if he had to. He was just in time to see the men being admitted to the house, along with their macabre bundle, by a cadaverous manservant carrying a single, flickering candle. Then the dark wood door was closed behind them.

Dieter did not wait around for very much longer after that. Looking into those dark shuttered windows of the house made Dieter feel uncomfortable, as if he were looking into the soulless eyes of a dead thing.

Turning his back on the darkly shuttered windows, feeling an unnatural cold chill the blood in his veins and a knot of fear clenching his stomach, Dieter left the house in Apothekar Allee. It took him a while to find his way back to a part of the town he recognised amidst the pervasive river mists, constantly looking back over his shoulder nervously at the way he had come, and he narrowly avoided two watch patrols as he made his way to his own lodgings in Dunst Strasse.

As he put his hand on the handle to open the door, a lonely temple bell chimed twelve times. Dieter froze, feeling the chill seep deeper into his bones and a wave of nauseous fear pass through his entire body. It was midnight, when all the malevolent things in the world went about their evil work. It was the witching hour. It was the time of black magicians and necromancers.

It was the time of the corpse takers.

SOMMERZEIT

The House of Doktor Drakus

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; never was a truer word spoken. Some would say it is the quest for knowledge that is what defines us as being superior to the lesser races of our world. Some would say it has driven mankind to become the dominant species of our world, and that it has made the Empire the dominant power of the Old World.

I could speak of Leonardo di Miragliano’s steam tank, Todmeister’s harquebus or Avel Ferrara’s subterranean drilling machine. Wondrous accomplishments all, but none achieved without first taking their own toll in human lives.

But it could also be argued that it is the insatiable quest for knowledge, man’s inherent and iniquitous curiosity, that has brought us to the brink of destruction. For it is scholars and greedy men searching the ruined necropolises of the ancient Nehekharans that has led to the disruption of eons-long sleep of the tomb kings of the Lands of the Dead. It has been the study of the esoteric arts within the lauded establishments of the Colleges of Magic in decadent Altdorf that has set so many magicians on the path of darkness. I could speak of Egrimm van Horstmann, the Grand Magister. I could speak of Heinrich Kemmler, or the Doomlord of Middenheim.

It is the quest for knowledge that has come to threaten the Empire and put our civilisation in such jeopardy like nothing else.

For what is the Empire really but a few precious pockets of humanity that flicker like tiny candle-flames in the all-enveloping darkness of the night? They are but sparks of civilisation that are as unstable and as easily put out as candle-flames in a hurricane.

And worst of all, once something has been learned, it cannot be unlearned. Would that it could.

So truly it can be said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, as can a little ability, for it can set you on a path from which you may never turn back.

Waking up wrapped in the familiar, stale-smelling sheets of his own bed again, with the Sommerzeit sun climbing quickly in the sky, the events of the previous night were as fresh and clear in Dieter’s mind as if they had only just taken place.

But whereas only a matter of hours earlier, when night had still gripped the town and its environs, he had been determined to report what he witnessed to the town authorities, and even the Templar Order of Sigmar, in the cold light of day he felt less confident about pursuing that particular course of action.

Whoever he told of what he had seen, the witch hunters would come to hear of it eventually. And when Brother-Captain Krieger learnt of Dieter’s confession, as it were, he would assume the worst. He would want to know why Dieter had been in the town’s garden of Morr at night for a start. Even if he told Krieger about the attack on the Four Seasons coach, and assuming that the two highwaymen had not disposed of the evidence already, there had been no survivors other than the black-hearted brigands themselves, to corroborate Dieter’s story. And if Krieger then discovered that Dieter had been back to Hangenholz, and that whilst he was there the apprentice’s father had died, such facts would only serve to fuel the fire of the brother-captain’s suspicions.

Dieter had seen how unreasonable the witch hunter had been and what he was capable of. It had only been thanks to Professor Theodrus’ intervention that Dieter had not been hauled away and tortured the first, and last, time he had met the psychotic Krieger. He did not think that the guild master’s favour would extend to saving the daemon apprentice’s neck a second time.

He could try leaving an anonymous tip-off with the Temple of Sigmar, but how many of those did they receive a day? And he couldn’t be certain which house it was that he had seen the grave robbers enter in Apothekar Allee. He would have to return there during the hours of daylight to confirm its location. And the thought of doing that filled him with trepidation. What if he had been seen that night? If he returned he might be spotted again and find himself reported to the witch hunters. Perhaps the grave robbers would have realised that they had been followed and would be on the lookout for him again.

However, the thought of returning to that strange house also filled him with a stomach-turning thrill of excitement. It was the same feeling he had unsettlingly enjoyed the night he had followed the corpse thieves through the mist-shrouded streets.

If he were to return to the house with the dead-eyed windows, he knew that his own insatiable curiosity would make him want to know more. And Morr only knew what Dieter might find if he dug too deep.

So, to begin with, Dieter did nothing. He told no one.

He returned to the physicians’ guild where little was said of the matters that had resulted in his absence from the guild for more than two weeks. Leopold showed some concern, lending Dieter his own notes so that he might catch up on at least some of what he had missed, but even his friend did not seem to know what to say in the face of the intense young man’s taciturn grief.

Dieter threw himself back into his studies with great gusto, determined to fulfil the vow he had made on leaving Hangenholz. He would learn all that he could about medicine, he would be the best. He had always preferred his own company to sharing that of others, and now he even distanced himself from those few people whom he had forged any bonds with before. He did little more than pass the time of day with Leopold when he saw him at the guild, and he no longer troubled the guild master himself.

The first day of summer and the feast day of Sigmar came and went with Dieter being almost totally unaware of the crowded streets, elaborate processions and banner-bedecked town houses, none coming close to the ostentation adorning of the grand Temple of Sigmar itself.

But no matter how deeply he immersed himself in his studies, Dieter could not get the memory of what he had seen out of his head. What a strange game it was that fate played. He would certainly not have chosen to be out during the hours of darkness, beyond the protection of the town walls.

He could not help wondering if he had stumbled upon the dealings of the infamous Corpse Taker. The ghoulish creature was supposedly responsible for numerous disappearances, possibly even deaths, and should be brought to justice. And if it was not the Corpse Taker, then there was another practitioner of the macabre and heretical hiding within Bögenhafen. Something needed to be done about the situation.

The longer it went on the worse it became, until Dieter had to tell someone else about what he had seen. He would go out of his mind if he did not. Worse than that, it was distracting him from his studies. He made the resolution there and then, as he was making a pretence of poring over Kerflach’s Agues and Maladies of the Reikland.

So it was that he found himself standing outside Professor Theodrus’ study, his knuckled fist raised ready to knock. But then something made him stay his hand.

Was this really what he wanted to do, a voice inside him asked? How kindly would Theodrus take to Dieter’s interruption, especially regarding their current “understanding”? And then there was the niggling reminder that the professor had already seemed to know a great deal about the Corpse Taker’s activities, a lot more than anybody else Dieter had encountered since he had come to Bögenhafen. More, it seemed, than even the witch hunters and he had been so assured in his protestations that Dieter was not the one the templars were hunting.

But he dared not tell Leopold either, not after how things had been left so inimically between them.

It was not until the twenty-eighth day of Sigmarzeit that Dieter went to Erich for advice. Even then, events did not turn out as he had planned.

Erich was at home for what as far as Dieter was concerned was the first time in three days. He was sitting at the table in their garret space with a familiar half-empty bottle of Reikland Hock uncorked in front of him, swilling the dregs around in his glass. His mangy ginger cat was sitting smugly on his lap having its ears fondled.

Emboldened by the glass of wine Erich had poured him, Dieter started to talk. And once he’d started, the words just poured out, and he found himself telling his friend everything… everything apart from how his pursuit of the grave robbers had given him a rush of excitement.

When he had finished Erich simply sat there, motionless in his chair, mouth agape and a stunned expression on his face. “Well, you’re a dark horse aren’t you, Herr Heydrich,” Erich said at last. “The black sheep of the family, eh? Well I don’t mind telling you, country boy, I didn’t think you had it in you. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

In the course of a few minutes, Dieter had changed Erich’s opinion of him utterly.

“But what do you think I should do?” Dieter asked, his shoulders sagging. He was suddenly aware of how relieved he felt having unburdened himself.

Erich stood up, a strange expression on his face, as if he wasn’t really there in the attic room anymore. He began to pace across the garret. “Do?”

His eyes were distant as if trained on something inside his own mind rather than in the cold reality of the chill attic room. It might be Sigmarzeit and the weather steadily warming outside, but the topmost apartment of Frau Keeler’s lodging house was still as draughty as a stable and cold as an icehouse.

“Do?” Erich repeated.

“Yes,” Dieter said mournfully, hoping that Erich was going to solve his problem for him. “Should I report what I saw to the authorities? To the witch hunters?”

“Are you insane?” Erich suddenly turned on Dieter. “Have you forgotten what that bastard Krieger almost did to you the last time? You give him this to fuel his fire and he’ll string you up from the nearest lamppost!”

Dieter looked at the floor, downcast. Of course his roommate was right. Krieger would treat anything that Dieter tried to tell him as evidence that Dieter was guilty of, if not actually being the Corpse Taker himself, then at least being his accomplice.

“S-so what now? I go on like this, knowing what I know but not being able to put things right? I-I was not able to prevent my father’s death, but if I could help expose the Corpse Taker I might be able to preserve the lives of others.”

Erich looked at Dieter from beneath beetling brows. “How can you be so certain that whoever it is that lives at the house in Apothekar Allee is the Corpse Taker?”

Dieter looked at him. “I don’t. B-but what I am certain of is that I watched as two thieves dug up a corpse and then followed them as they brought it into the town, under cover of mist and darkness, to that self-same house.”

“And what was it you told me that old duffer Theodrus said about there being unlicensed doktors—at least not ones licensed by the guild—practising secretly in Bögenhafen? Doktors with dangerously progressive ideas, Shallya forbid?”

“Yes,” Dieter admitted warily.

He recalled quite clearly what he had told Erich after his encounter with Anselm Fleischer at the Temple of Shallya, but he also recalled what had happened to Anselm Fleischer himself after allegedly apprenticing himself to a physician with progressive ideas.

“Couldn’t it simply be that the house belongs to one such doktor?”

“But you seem to be forgetting that I saw a human cadaver being delivered to the place.”

“Just think: how hard must it be for a scholar to get hold of a real human body to examine? And what if the study of that corpse was the only way to advance medical science? You certainly couldn’t get hold of a body by any conventional means that I’m aware of.”

“Anatomy is the preserve of barber-surgeons,” Dieter said, uncertainly.

“Listen to yourself,” Erich sneered. “You sound like Theodrus. I bet you wouldn’t be so down on barber-surgeons if you had St Salvus’ rot and the only cure was to have your arm lopped off. You’d want a man who knew his way around a body on the other end of the rusty scalpel then, I can tell you.”

Dieter inadvertently winced at the thought.

“You want to heal people, don’t you?” Erich suddenly challenged Dieter.

Dieter glowered at him. “Of course I do. You know that.”

“And you would do what you could to improve methods and cures so that you could save more people?”

“Yes.”

“What if the only way you could achieve that was to experiment on human corpses by dissecting them? Do you mean to tell me that you would give up your pursuit to cure the sick for fear of cutting up a few dead bodies?”

Dieter said nothing but fixed Erich with his intensely dark eyes, his mouth tight-lipped.

“Perhaps the occupant of the house in Apothekar Allee is just such a doktor,” Erich said, his voice dripping with reason. “Imagine what his work with the dead might mean for the living. Imagine what treatments might be discovered, what procedures developed. Imagine a cure for the red pox or manic moon fever. And you would deny all this because of the preconceived superstitions of a staid and out-dated association such as the guild of physicians?”

What if Erich were right, Dieter considered? If his suppositions were correct, then perhaps others would not have to go through what he had endured as a child after his mother died.

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Why don’t we find out for ourselves, before involving the bigoted brotherhood of Sigmar? Why don’t we go back to Apothekar Allee?”

It had been Erich’s idea to break into the house, as though they were a couple of common burglars, just as it had been his idea to go back to the house and have a look around. It had been a combination of three flagons of ale consumed at the Cutpurse’s Hands and an insatiable, almost obsessive, curiosity that had persuaded Dieter to join him. Erich’s natural charisma had also played a part. Dieter realised that he was surrounded by people he idolised and wanted to be more like. Theodrus was one, Leopold was one, and so was Erich.

The two apprentices waited until the salubrious tavern was on the verge of closing before leaving. Dieter chose their route through the night-muffled town, making it more circuitous than need be, keeping clear of the artisans’ quarter to make sure that in case they were seen, no one would suspect where they were heading.

The day had been overcast for much of the time, despite the months having matured to Sommerzeit now, but with the night the cloud cover was clearing. Mannslieb looked upon their endeavours with an impartial eye as they progressed through the town.

Having taken a wrong turning once or twice, after almost half an hour, the two found themselves at the end of a narrow alleyway that ran between tall, neglected and possibly even empty tenements. A sign fastened to the crumbling bricks of one of the buildings stated that they had at last found their way to Apothekar Allee.

“Come on, what are we waiting for?” Erich whispered, but even he had lost some of the enthusiasm that he had displayed earlier.

Neither of them felt particularly confident about their chosen course of action, but they had come this far. Just a few more steps and they would be at the house. What harm could that do? They advanced into the narrow street together and approached the dead-eyed house.

“There’s a plaque here,” Erich said in a harsh whisper. “Next to the door.”

“What does it say?” Dieter asked.

“I can’t make it out. Whatever name was written here has been scratched out.”

Dieter made no further comment, but the defaced plaque only served to add to his sense of unease.

The house was in an obvious state of decay and it was this fact that provided them with a way in. It was Erich who found the loose shutter and the rotten window behind it on the first floor. With both of them balancing on the roof of an abutting lean-to belonging to a neighbouring derelict house, the students were able to reach the window. It did not take much to force the latch, the wood of the casement splintering wetly around the rusted iron fitting.

“Come on,” Erich said, the moonlight reflecting madly from his eyes, “give me a leg up.”

Dieter was not entirely sure what is was that made him cup his hands for Erich to push his body up and in through the window, or what it was that meant he then allowed himself to be pulled inside too, rather than turn tail and flee right there and then. As he stood in the all but pitch-black room beyond, he tried to tell himself that it was merely alcohol-fuelled bravado and nothing more. To admit that it might be anything more than that was to invite an uncomfortable degree of introspection and mental self-exploration.

Inside, the property was as rundown as it appeared from the outside. The room they found themselves in was lacking any furniture whatsoever. The floorboards were bare, bristling with splinters; the walls damp, flaking plaster. Erich, recovering some of his former courage, led the way out of the room.

Beyond they found themselves on an equally bleak landing. A staircase ran both up to a floor above and downstairs, the banister staves broken or entirely missing in places. There was a musty smell of mildew in the air around them. It seemed as if no one had lived here for a very long time, and yet he had seen the two body snatchers admitted by a manservant of some description only last month.

Erich peered up the next flight of stairs to the darkness of the floor above. Satisfied that there was no danger likely to come from that direction, he looked cautiously over the edge of the banisters. Dieter did the same.

Light from a street lamp entering the building from outside through the slats of a shuttered window barely made the floor below visible to them. The passageway below was laid with interlocking tiles which might once have been black and white but which were now a uniform grey-brown, thanks to the layers of dirt that had been allowed to besmirch them.

Erich led the way forward, along the landing, keeping his back flat against the wall and as far from the staircase banisters as possible. Two other doors led off to rooms on this floor, one directly ahead and one to the left. The panels of the doors were scratched, their varnish peeling.

Any haze of alcohol had been cleared from the inquisitive apprentices’ minds by the adrenaline now racing round their bodies at the thought of exploring the sepulchral house. Erich stopped outside the first door. No light spilled from underneath it. Pressing himself close against the jamb, he turned the handle and pushed the door open. Hinges groaned in protest. Erich froze.

There was a noise like footsteps, but had it come from the alleyway beyond the window through which they had broken in, or from somewhere inside the house?

The two students waited for several long, anxious moments. Dieter had never felt so on edge, so exhilarated.

Hearing nothing else, at long last Erich peered into the room. His jaw dropped open and he stepped inside. Dieter followed. Once they were both inside Erich pushed the door to again. Then he spoke for the first time since they had entered the deathly house.

“Will you look at this?” he whispered excitedly.

Dieter just stood agog, staring. One of the room’s windows was unshuttered and wan moonlight lit the chamber with its eerie, unearthly luminescence. In that light the layout and contents of the room could be seen quite clearly.

Rows of bookshelves covered every wall of the room. This had to be the owner’s private library. The only other piece of furniture in the room was an ink-stained, leather-topped writing desk but this appeared as old and neglected as the rest of the fabric of the house. Resting on its surface, rather disconcertingly, was a human skull.

Dieter suspected that the rarity of some of the books kept here could rival those of the physicians’ guild library itself. Dieter was in a state of rapture. Imagine what knowledge would be available here to one who wanted to improve his knowledge of the human body and all its ills, and improve his chances of healing that same assemblage of organs?

Dieter scanned the shelves, reading the spines of the volumes collected there. Some, like Hampfner’s Herbs of the Mootland and their Uses and the Tilean text known simply as the Medicina, he recognised. Others were entirely new to him. There was Nemilos’ Ars Immortalis and Burial Rites of the Unberogens.

Then there were other books whose titles were written in languages he didn’t understand and some using alphabets he didn’t even recognise. There was something labelled in a calligraphic script that Dieter believed was from the far away, mystical kingdom of Araby that lay across the sea beyond the lands of the Border Princes. And there weren’t just books; there were scrolls as well, and even, most curiously, a broken baked clay tablet covered in markings that looked like crude pictograms.

Dieter reached up and took an untitled volume down from a shelf.

“What are you doing?” Erich hissed.

“You were the one who suggested we take a closer look,” Dieter replied in a whisper.

He opened the book. It smelt musty and damp. Spots of mould patterned the pages of the book. The title page was printed in a heavy, gothic type but the language appeared to be Bretonnian. Written on the flyleaf in a dated, over-fussy script was a name: Drakus. For want of an alternative Dieter took it that Drakus was the name of the individual whose library this was.

“It would appear our mysterious, progressive doktor has a name,” he whispered to his companion, who had crossed back to the door and was peering through the gap at the landing beyond.

“What?”

“It would seem that this house belongs to one Doktor Drakus.”

“What was that?” Erich suddenly hissed, peering through the gap in the half-open door.

Dieter froze, the book open in his hands. What was it Erich had heard? So engrossed was he in the book he held in his hands he had heard nothing. Neither of them moved nor spoke, ears straining for the slightest sound.

Nothing.

Dieter carefully replaced the slim volume into its place on the shelf.

Erich was getting nervous, his former bravado having evaporated entirely now that he was actually inside the house of Doktor Drakus. Strangely, Dieter was beginning to feel more relaxed the longer they stayed. Disturbingly, he almost felt at home in the moonlit library.

“We’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” Erich whispered, looking sidelong at Dieter but not daring to move from his position at the door.

But Dieter did not want to leave. He was fascinated by the library and its collection of seemingly morbid and macabre books.

“I heard something!” Erich hissed. “For Sigmar’s sake, we need to go now!”

Dieter listened. There was another echo of a creak outside the room.

Erich pulled open the library door and edged out onto the landing again, casting one last desperate look of exasperation at the curiously intense, pale young man.

Dieter heard another creak. Someone was coming up the stairs.

His eyes locked on the spine of Leichemann’s Anatomy and the plain, scuffed black leather book on the shelf next to it. His heart raced. His mind whirled.

And then he was tucking the two volumes inside the front of his robe and dashing from the room, hardly daring to let his feet touch the floor in case the floorboards creaked under his weight and gave him away.

Then he was back in the first room in the house they had entered, following Erich out of the broken window. He dropped into the alley behind the house from the roof of the lean-to. And then the two of them were sprinting away as if their very lives were in peril, back through the clinging mists that swathed the streets, back past the Cutpurse’s Hands and back to Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse.

They did not stop to draw breath until they were back in their garret apartment, the door slammed shut behind them and the bolt thrown home.

From that moment on Dieter found himself living in a heightened state of anxiety, expecting the watch, or worse still Krieger’s witch hunters, to turn up on his doorstep at any moment, having somehow got word of the theft from the house in Apothekar Allee, and knowing him to be responsible.

What if, as Erich had first proposed, this Doktor Drakus was nothing more than a physician whose progressive practices had denied him acceptance by the guild? What if he were guilty of nothing more than showing a little ingenuity and perseverance in the face of adversity? And Dieter had stolen from him, something that was completely out of character for him.

Dieter dared not leave the lodging house now, so fearful had his own paranoid imaginings made him. Erich had taken to his bed with a bottle of cheap hock for company on their return from their night’s escapade and didn’t emerge again until more than a day had passed.

But Dieter was not idle during his self-imposed incarceration. Living on a stale loaf, a hard lump of cheese and the occasional bowl of vegetable broth that a concerned Frau Keeler began to bring up to him after two days had passed—concerned that the young medical student was himself pining for something that he no doubt picked up tending to the sick—he began to pour over the two volumes he had taken from the house of Doktor Drakus.

The plain, black leather book was the chronicle of one scholar’s search for the lost knowledge of the Nehekharans and although it made interesting reading, it did not really teach Dieter anything very useful. Leichemann’s Anatomy, on the other hand, fascinated him and he had to admit that he found the concepts and detailed information it contained easy to digest and integrate with his own knowledge. In fact, he seemed to have a strange affinity for the ideas presented within the book. He put that down to the long association he had had with death, growing up in Hangenholz as the son of a priest of the mortuary cult of Morr.

After a week, with no sudden and unexpected visits from the watch, or worse, Dieter braved being out and about in the town again. He even dared return to the guild to continue his work there. When Doktor Hirsch asked where he had been, Dieter told him that he had been suffering from a heavy summer cold. Lying was something else he wasn’t used to doing quite so blatantly.

Hirsch backed away from him abruptly at that admission and said, “You want to be careful that it’s not something more serious.” The elderly physician took a flask from the shelf behind him that was cluttered with all manner of jars and bottles. “Here, drink this tincture. I’ve heard talk that there is plague in Stirland.”

He watched as Dieter downed the contents of the flask, making sure every last drop was consumed. Then, apparently satisfied that Dieter was no longer infectious or a danger to his own health, set him to work grinding popping seeds.

But Dieter no longer spent every hour possible studying in the guild library or with Doktor Hirsch in his laboratory. Instead, when he had some spare time, no matter if it was even only an hour between lectures, Dieter would return to his lodgings and the private study he was making there of Leichemann’s Anatomy.

On the thirtieth day of Sommerzeit, Dieter was making notes on a chapter entitled Of the Dismemberment of Rats when there was a loud knock at his door.

For a moment all of his previous worries that he might have attracted the attentions of the authorities by his breaking and entering escapade resurfaced. He glanced at the dormer window in his room but knew that realistically there was no escape from the attic room that way.

The knock came again: three loud raps.

He couldn’t not answer the door—he was the only one home—as whoever it was without might only break it down anyway, in which case he’d have no way of keeping them out. He would have to talk to whoever was there and put them off that way.

Dieter fumbled the book and his own notebook closed, then pulled a drift of parchment drawings over them. Taking a deep breath he crossed the shared dining room and opened the door a crack.

Leopold Hanser was standing at the top of the stairs. He looked almost angry.

“There you are,” the blond-haired student said, the annoyance apparent in his voice. “What are you doing stuck in here?”

“I-I’m studying,” Dieter replied.

“But you’ve missed another lecture at the guild.”

“Another? I wasn’t aware I had missed any.”

“Doktor Hirsch said you’d been feeling under the weather. He wanted to know if you’d been to Stirland recently.”

“What? No,” Dieter said, bewildered. His thoughts were still back with the volume on his desk. At that moment he wasn’t even quite sure what time of day it was, and he couldn’t be certain which day of the week it was either.

“Look, what’s going on, Dieter?” Leopold asked, his frowning features softening.

“N-nothing. There’s nothing going on.”

“Is it because of your father?”

“No, it’s got nothing to do with him!”

Leopold put a hand on the door as if to push it open. “Can we talk about this inside?”

“No.” Dieter’s tone was adamant. He held the door where it was, his body braced against it.

“Why not?”

“I’m studying.”

“By Shallya,” Leopold’s anger was coming to the fore again now. “I don’t know what’s come over you but it’s nothing good, I’ll warrant.”

“Good day to you, Leopold,” Dieter said and slammed the door shut in his friend’s face.

Dieter returned to his seat at his desk. As he pushed the scattered papers clear of the two books again he happened to notice that amongst them were two letters from Hangenholz, the address of his lodgings written on them in his sister’s cursive hand. Both were still unopened. He put the letters to one side with hardly a second thought and turned back to the utterly absorbing Of the Dismemberment of Rats.

The thought crossed Dieter’s mind, as he copied the diagram of a rat’s digestive system into his notebook, that if he were to advance any further in his study of anatomy then he would have to find his own specimens for dissection very soon.

Another thought followed. What would Professor Theodrus think if he knew that his erstwhile, most apt pupil was practising the barbarism of anatomy and that he had become no better than one of his dreaded barber-surgeons?

Who cared? Dieter certainly didn’t anymore.

Dieter was at the work table in his garret room, papers and notebooks spread out all around him. Stretched out on a dissection tablet block in front of him was the eviscerated toad, thick steel pins holding its contorted body in place. He was poking at its pallid innards with the razor-sharp blade of his scalpel.

In the flickering candlelight it almost looked like the toad’s tiny heart was still beating.

Dieter peered closer. The dark muscle of its heart spasmed again. Dieter jerked his head back, startled. It must be some vital energy of the amphibian’s still trapped inside it, somehow released as he dissected it. It certainly couldn’t be alive, not after he had caught and killed it the day before and what with half its internal organs missing.

Dieter stared at the toad’s small black heart, not moving a muscle, concentrating on keeping his breathing calm and measured. The candle continued to crackle and flicker. The heart did not move again.

Cautiously Dieter probed deeper into the toad’s innards with the tip of the scalpel. He felt resistance and then a sudden release of pressure as the blade severed something. A spurt of sticky black fluid squirted out of the toad’s viscera into Dieter’s face, making him blink and draw back again.

This time it was the whole of the toad’s body that moved. It spasmed where it was, its jerking movements tearing its limbs free of the pins, ripping the flesh away to leave ragged wounds. Inexplicably, it also seemed larger to Dieter than it had been before.

Dieter jumped up from his chair, throwing it over on the floor behind him, his own heart pounding in his chest in panicked horror. The warty creature rolled itself over and began to drag itself in an ungainly motion towards him, its bloated yellowed body trailing the mess of its intestines and other bloated purple organs.

The creature’s disgusting tongue suddenly whipped out from between the drawn, and for some reason fang-lined, edges of its cavernous mouth and caught Dieter’s right hand a stinging blow.

Dieter looked down at his hand. A strike from a toad’s tongue shouldn’t hurt that much. Where the toxic purple tongue had stung him the skin was rising in pus-weeping red welts. Dieter rubbed his hand against the rough cloth of his robe, as if that might rub away the painful stinging sensation.

The scalpel was still clenched in his hand. The tongue shot out again but Dieter was ready for it this time. He lashed out with the silvered blade. The worm-like tongue flopped onto the floorboards of his room, oozing black ichor.

He looked back to the table.

Dieter could hear a rustling amongst the piles of papers. He looked to where a notebook was sliding across the worktop. Then the book slipped to the floor as well, revealing the putrefying cut up body of a rat crawling across the table. The rat turned its nose towards Dieter, whiskers twitching, fixing him with one beady, jaundiced eye and one glistening empty eye-socket.

But that was only the first. From beneath the papers on his desk they came, from under the table, from the dark corners of the room, from knotholes in the floorboards and the shadowy rafters of the ceiling above him: slithering things, decomposing bodies, dissected vermin. Dead things.

“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”

Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt wringing wet. Violet pre-dawn light was creeping in through the dormer window. A figure was standing at the door in the partition that divided Dieter’s room from the rest of the garret. The figure’s face was in shadow.

“Erich? D-did I wake you?”

“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”

“Y-yes, I suppose it was,” Dieter conceded.

“Well, if you’re all right I’m going to try and get some more sleep before the hangover I can feel swelling behind my eyes really kicks in,” Erich said, the shadow retreating from around him as the sky continued to lighten outside.

Half Erich’s face was missing. Where there should have been warm pink flesh there was only the bare bone of his skull. Dieter screamed again. What made the vision all the more horrible and repulsive was the fact that the rest of his roommate’s face was still there, only fat maggots writhed and wriggled in the rotten jelly that filled the eye-socket and a thin black gruel dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

“What is it, Heydrich?” Erich asked, his voice gargling through the disgusting fluid collecting in his throat, apparently oblivious to his own horrific predicament.

Dieter’s stomach turned over and he vomited over his already sodden bed sheets. Then he was up and out of his bed. As he pushed past the startled Erich, the rest of his friend’s face fell away as well. He half-ran and half-fell down the stairs but then he was out in the street, gulping in great lungfuls of cold morning air. Frau Keeler was there too.

“Good morning, Herr Heydrich,” she said through rotten teeth. “I see you’re feeling better then.” The landlady’s face was a mess of necrotic tissue, ripe with burrowing grave-worms. In her hands she was holding bloody clumps of her own hair.

Dieter ran. The night mists from the River Bögen still clung to the town. As he ran in mortal terror through Bögenhafen, Dieter found that the streets were thronged with people. But as he passed and they turned towards him, he saw that every single one of them was a grotesque living corpse, their bodies at varying stages of decay. Hands that were little more than skeletal claws reached for him. As he listened, their pleas and protestations were transformed into incomprehensible moans. Then the mists swallowed him up.

There was an abrupt silence. The walking dead were gone.

The sickly fog parted and Dieter found himself standing at the door of the house in Apothekar Allee; the house of Doktor Drakus.

Dieter put his hand to the door. The moan of creaking hinges broke the silence of the muffling mist and the door yawned open before him.

“Heydrich! What’s the matter?”

Dieter opened his eyes. He was lying in bed, the sheets and his nightshirt soaked with sweat. The orange light of dawn was permeating his room. Erich was standing at the door, his face in shadow.

Dieter sat up sharply, drawing his sheets close to him, up under his chin, as if that might somehow protect him.

“Erich, step out of the shadow,” he hissed madly.

His roommate took a step forward.

“You were screaming. That must have been one hell of a nightmare you were having.”

Erich’s face was gaunt, pale and drawn, but as it should be.

“We have to go back,” Dieter said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.

“What? What are you talking about? Go back where?”

“You know where,” Dieter fixed Erich with a wild-eyed stare.

“No, not there,” Erich replied, his face falling and a look of horror forming in his own eyes. “Our last visit freaked me out totally. I had to drink myself to sleep that night. I’m not going back there.”

“But we have to. I have to know more. I have to know who Doktor Drakus is,” Dieter was raving now. There was a manic quality to his demeanour. “I think the library there holds the answers I’m looking for, the secret knowledge I’ve been searching for without really realising it. I think that in that library I’ll find the means to put off death, delay it, prevent it; perhaps conquer it altogether!”

Erich stared back at Dieter aghast, not knowing what to say.

But Dieter was determined. “We have to go back to Apothekar Allee. We have to return to the house of Doktor Drakus.”

VORGEHEIM

Post Mortem

It is a commonly held misconception that, because of their dealings with the world of the dead, necromancers hate life. This could not be further from the truth!

Those who pursue the art of necromancy might well spend years plundering the burial places of the dead—neglected graveyards, foetid charnel houses, ancient barrow mounds and dusty desert necropolises—shunning daylight in favour of the cloaking shadow of night and the company of the living for that of mouldering corpses. But the rationale for this behaviour is so that they might cling on to life—what life they have—with the tenacity of a gut-lodged tapeworm.

Some, it is true, come to necromancy by mistake. They desire knowledge for its own sake, or seek to save their own lives or that of a loved one. Perhaps it is also true that many who come to practise the dark art are inclined to madness and dark desires, for what else could bring them to the study of the most base and vile form of the mage’s art? However, there is something about their proscribed pursuit that invariably turns them to the dark path.

And then there are some for whom the study of necromancy is undertaken purely out of an intrinsically evil purpose to bring about the end of others, perhaps even that of the world. Such creatures are the vile leech-sorcerers of vampire-kind, the necrarchs, W’soran take them all!

A pox on their accursed kind! May their damned souls never find rest until Morrslieb crashes to earth and obliterates our world!

No, necromancers love life with an unbearable passion. They crave it. And why are they so desperate to cling to the deathless semblance of life they strive to maintain? Because the only emotion they feel more strongly than an obsessive desire for life, or power, or mastery of the dark arts, or to satisfy a savage lust for murder and slaughter, is a total, unholy fear of the alternative—an abject, mortal fear of death itself!

Oh, how they dread the deathly touch of Morr’s cold hand. For all necromancers know that when Morr comes for them there will be no peace for those who would defile the final resting places of the dead, who would disturb the eternal sleep of the dead, who would—if their will were done—overturn nature and defy the god of death and dreams. For them, only the agonising torment of an eternity in limbo awaits.

The two men stood outside the dead-eyed house again. This time Dieter had been the one who was determined to return to the decaying town house: it was he who was the driving force behind the venture and it had been Erich who had needed cajoling to accompany him. In the end it had been a combination of alcohol and the guilty knowledge that he was responsible for getting the younger man into this situation in the first place that ensured Erich followed Dieter back to Apothekar Allee as dusk was falling on the evening of the third day of Vorgeheim.

It was whilst they were sitting in the Cutpurse’s Hands, Erich summoning the courage to fulfil the promise he had made to his once impressionable roommate, and with Dieter desperate for them to get on their way, that Erich had produced the knife. It was not so much a knife as a stiletto dagger—ten inches of black steel. He had dulled the blade with soot so that if it were necessary to go into the house armed, the weapon wouldn’t reflect any light and give the two of them away.

Dieter didn’t know how Erich had come by the dagger and he didn’t ask. Once he might have been shocked to see that Erich had a knife. Now it just seemed like a sensible precaution, all things considered.

The last rays of a dying sun stained the windows of surrounding buildings crimson, like blood clouding in water. As dusk’s shadows crawled along the street and thickened in the narrow spaces between the tenements, Dieter and Erich found that the window they had used to break into the house the first time was just as they had left it weeks before. Nothing had been done to secure it, so that Dieter could almost have believed that there was nobody living in the house at all, except that he knew otherwise now. He could feel it in his bones, deep in the very core of his being.

This time it was Dieter who led the way inside, wasting no time as the cerise stain of sunset above the western horizon darkened to purple. It was Erich who hung back anxiously, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds as he lingered in the alleyway, convinced that they might be seen or terrified of what might be waiting for them in the dark. It was the same sense of guilt tinged with a morbid fascination that had been awoken in him too that led him to eventually enter the house after Dieter, who seemed to no longer need his company for reassurance and to bolster his confidence.

Dieter did not delay in the spartan room but went immediately to the door. Peering through the crack Dieter could see no one on the stairs or the dark-panelled landing. Listening, he could hear nothing. He crept out of the room and across the landing, past the door to the esoteric library, only stopping when he reached the top of the staircase that led down to the ground floor of the house.

Dieter could feel his heart thumping loudly in his chest, but he inhaled deeply, through his nose, concentrating on keeping his pulse steady. His hand on the dark-stained banister, he began to descend the staircase. He didn’t quite know why, but some instinct buried deep within him told him that was the way he wanted to go.

Then Erich was there, his worried face peering down at him from the turn of the stair from the floor above.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

Dieter looked back up at Erich, fixing him with a dagger-tipped stare.

“Be quiet,” he replied, his voice low. “What does it look like?”

“Do we really need to be here?” Erich was leaning half over the banister, reluctant to go any further himself.

“I have to find out who Doktor Drakus is.”

Dieter continued to slowly descend the staircase. A board creaked beneath his foot and he froze, but no sound came from anywhere within the strange house. He heard a pattering on the threadbare carpet on the stairs and then Erich was behind him, both of them now standing in the tiled hallway of the ground floor.

“Is that really it?” Erich challenged him. “Is that really why we’re here? Are you sure you are not looking for the answers to deeper, more far-reaching problems?”

“I have to know if Drakus is the Corpse Taker,” Dieter whispered.

Erich’s appalled expression remained.

“But who is Drakus?”

Dieter suddenly sharply shushed Erich.

The other student froze. Neither said anything. Their senses strained to breaking point, their eyes adjusting to the gloom of the passageway, they could see marks on the walls showing where paintings and portraits must once have hung. But what scenes had they depicted? Whose portraits had been displayed here?

And as half his mind considered the missing paintings, Dieter heard muffled voices; distinct enough that he could be certain he was hearing them, yet indistinct enough to not know what was being said. Erich made as if he was about to turn and flee. Dieter grabbed his sleeve.

“We are not done here,” he said, his voice quiet but dripping with menace.

Taking measured, silent steps, Dieter led the way along the passageway towards the back of the house. There was a door to his right, under the stairs. Pressing an ear to the door, he could hear the voices more clearly. There seemed to be a regular rhythm to them now. It sounded like chanting. But what part of a doktor’s work could require him to chant?

Dieter couldn’t have stopped now if he wanted to; his obsessive inquisitiveness wouldn’t let him. It gripped him and wouldn’t let him go, like a dog with a marrowbone. Dieter put his hand to the door and eased it open, teeth gritted against the hinges squeaking. The door swung open. Before him a set of worn stone steps descended into the basement of the house, faintly illuminated by a flickering light source somewhere beneath him. A gust of chill air rose from the cellar, smelling of mould and putrefaction.

It seemed that Erich couldn’t leave him now either. His blade gleamed dully in his hand, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the knife’s hilt. They were both in this until the end, until Morr only knew what resolution to their investigation awaited them.

Dieter continued downwards, the chanting voices becoming clearer with each step. He still did not understand what words were being chanted; they seemed to be in a language he did not understand. But as he heard the words he felt his scalp tighten and the hairs on his head stand on end. The sound made a chill seep into every pore.

Dieter was abruptly aware that his teeth were chattering. He bit down hard, clamping them together. Was it really that cold beneath the house, or was it something else?

The stone steps ended and another passageway began, this one faced with crumbling bricks, slick with algae and water. The ceiling was strung with cobwebs bearing the skeletal husks of spiders. The light flickered at the other end of the passage. By following this path Dieter risked coming face-to-face with whoever was in the basement, probably Doktor Drakus. But he could not help himself now.

Before he really knew it, he was peering around the archway at the other end of the passage into the vault beyond. More steps descended to the floor of the chamber whilst to his right a low arched gallery ran around two sides of the chamber.

It was said that Bögenhafen was built on top of the ruins of previous settlements. Erich himself had once told him over a flagon of ale in the Cutpurse’s Hands that a long-forgotten order of Templar knights—he had not known their name—had once had a seminary within the environs of the dock on the River Bögen and had buried their dead in catacombs dug out beneath it. It seemed that the basement connected to part of these rumoured catacombs.

Dieter ducked into the gallery and crouched down, half-hidden by an arch. Erich followed him. From their vantage point Dieter could see clearly into the vault. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more the place reminded him of a crypt.

Erich’s breathing was shallow and noisy. Dieter glared at him and Erich, realising suddenly what he was doing, clamped his mouth shut. The two students then peered down into the chamber below and were appalled by what they saw.

The first thing that drew Dieter’s eye was the naked, greening corpse stretched out on the bloodstained table at the centre of the chamber. The gore-encrusted, grainy wood looked more like a butcher’s block than an autopsy table. It could not possibly be the body that he had seen the grave robbers steal from the cemetery of Morr’s field. That had been two months ago and this body was distinctly fresher. It had to be another, unless it had been subject to some embalming process.

The body was that of a man who had reached his fourth decade before he died, by the looks of things. A dark red incision that ran from below the dead man’s neck to his groin showed that the corpse had been gutted.

Standing at the head of the autopsy table was someone Dieter recognised. It was the manservant who had admitted the body snatchers to the house on that fateful night back on the second of Sigmarzeit. His cadaverous features made him look like he had more in common with the body on the slab than either Dieter or Erich. His hair was thinning and his visible scalp was marked with liver spots. He had the look of an ancient family retainer about him; the kind of servant who had seen at least three generations pass on their way without ever seeming to age himself, already seeming old to begin with.

It was clear that this cadaverous creature was nothing more than the manservant, for the real force at work here was the man Dieter assumed to be Doktor Drakus, or at least the man who went by that name. Whilst the manservant stood at the end of the table, holding a lantern over the body, the surgeon himself was leaning over the cavity in the eviscerated corpse, his back to the two uninvited observers.

Dieter’s heart skipped a beat. What was it he was witnessing here? The gruesome scene laid out beneath him, carried out in such clandestine conditions certainly suggested dark practices were being employed. But then Dieter disengaged his emotions and let wild speculation be superseded by rational thought, and he took in the rest of his surroundings.

Laid out on benches and trestle tables around the basement, within reach of the doktor as he worked, were the tools of his trade. Many of the accoutrements on display were those that Dieter would expect to be used by a doktor or a surgeon: knives, bone-cutting saws, long-handled tweezers, bowls of dirty water with blood-stained rags left soaking in them. The majority of these items were rusting, or crusted with strings of gore. And yet there were as many other instruments, the purpose for which they had been designed Dieter could barely begin to imagine.

Amongst these there was a clay mannequin of a human figure stuck with steel pins, a severed human hand mounted on a wooden stand, burning tallow wicks stuck in the tips of its fingers, and something that looked like the skeleton of an infant poised upon a wire frame to make it look like it was dancing a macabre jig. The addition of a bony tail and horns to the skeleton only served to make it look even more disturbing.

Dieter also noticed a heavy tome lying open on another table and tacked to a wall a curious drawing of a human figure marked with inexplicable lines. It was as though they mapped energy centres in the body. The chart was annotated with vertical columns of an even stranger script made up of crossed pen-brush lines. The image of the man looked like the description he had once heard of the race that lived in mysterious Cathay, far away to the east.

Both the doktor and his manservant were chanting. The eerie sound echoed around the vault, amplifying the sound and making it seem even more eerie, unnatural and inhuman.

The doktor straightened, turning to reach for something on the workbench behind him. For the first time Dieter saw his face. He stifled a gasp and glanced at Erich, but his companion was too terrified to make a sound. It was not who he had half been expecting to see. Erich was simply staring in open-mouthed horror at the man. Dieter’s own morbid fascination compelled him to look again.

Doktor Drakus was tall and lean, not unlike Erich in build. He was wearing a filthy robe, stained almost black in places by dried blood and other fluids, but made notable by the esoteric glyphs picked out in gold thread on the collar and lapels. His tapered fingertips and filed nails made his hands look more like talons. But it was the man’s face that made Dieter’s stomach knot in repulsion and dread.

Drakus’ head was completely bald. Instead of hair his shrivelled scalp was covered with suppurating green buboes, crusted with mouldering black scabs. One oozing canker obscured much of his right eye. An open sore at the corner of his drawn lips made it look like the mouth split open almost to his ear on the left side. Some flesh-eating disease had eaten away much of the soft tissue of his nose so that Dieter could practically see the denuded bone underneath. The man looked like a victim of the most terrible plague.

Almost as an afterthought Dieter put his hand to his mouth. If there was plague here he and Erich should get away as quickly as possible, before they were infected. Perhaps they were already too late? Perhaps they were already carrying the terrible disease simply by having entered the house? But then again, the doktor’s manservant showed no signs of illness.

There was talk of plague in nearby towns and villages. Could the two be connected? And yet even though Dieter knew that he should get away, he could not tear himself away from the disturbing ritual he was witnessing. The doktor was now suturing the split in the corpse’s midriff. He and Erich watched transfixed as the doktor worked.

Dieter kept telling himself that this could still just be a doktor about his Shallya-ordained business. He assured himself that the buboes and lesions on the doktor’s face were merely symptoms of some other non-contagious disease that the unfortunate wretch was suffering from. He kept trying to convince himself that the chanting, the carving up of the body and the unsettling artefacts were all simply part of some new medical procedure. He kept telling himself that there was nothing to really fear here. He failed on all counts.

But he dared not admit to himself what he was witnessing.

He was sure that he had discovered the lair of the Corpse Taker.

The doktor had finished sewing up the gaping hole in the cadaver and now he was making strange hand gestures over the body, the chanting growing in intensity. This curious procedure made Dieter feel sick to the pit of his stomach. Each gesture the doktor made burnt itself into his memory. The incomprehensible words of the chanting reverberated through his mind as if they were somehow familiar to him.

As the mantra went on, the atmosphere in the cellar-laboratory changed perceptibly. Dieter could feel a static charge building within his own body, as if caught in the middle of a nascent thunderstorm. He felt the shadows thicken around him. The air itself had taken on a cloying quality. It seemed greasy and tainted.

Seen out of the corners of his eyes as he watched the doktor and the ritual taking place before him, the impenetrable darkness that would not be beaten back from the corners of the vault seemed to run out like an oil slick across the ceiling and the crumbling walls, gradually enveloping the room, as if the shadows were trying to quench what little, inconstant light there was.

Erich was whimpering now but Dieter heard the sound as if he were a dispassionate observer and did nothing to stop him. His whole being was too intently locked on the scene in front of him. It seemed to Dieter that there were things moving in the spreading shadows. There was the impression of clawing hands reaching towards the doktor and the corpse on the table. And now he thought he could hear another sound in the cellar accompanying the chanting, a susurrating whisper like the rattling of insect wing cases, disembodied voices chattering insistently from beyond the other side of the veil of existence.

A familiar acrid smell assailed his nostrils now: Erich had lost control of his bladder.

Dieter could feel a terrible pressure building behind his eyeballs. As the shadows grew, images and thoughts entered his head unbidden. Grinning death’s-head skulls. His father intoning a prayer as he prepared a body for burial. Sticking a knife into the guts of another and twisting. Lank-haired corpses swinging from crossroad gibbets. Dark tombs ripe with the stink of decay. Scattering shovelfuls of grave-dirt on a struggling, gagged body bound in a filthy shroud. Soil and stones skittering from the mounds of freshly dug graves as the things buried within tried to push free of their damp earth prisons. Rat-eaten bodies jerking with unnatural life. Cutting the hands from a hanged man. Albrecht Heydrich lying cold in his bed, his last breath having left him and along with it the vital spark of life. Removing mouldering, black organs from a butchered carcass. Battlefields strewn with the fallen as the ravens made their feast. Fashioning a creature from the pieces of other dead things. The images were familiar, not frightening.

The pressure continued to build. And now it was as if he were caught in the middle of a great gale that howled across the world, sweeping over ancient battle sites, barrow-tombs, hangman’s scaffolds, cemeteries and massacred villages, saturated with doom and despair, carrying death in its wings. The cold, dark wind whipped at his robes, tugged at his hair, even blew through him.

Dieter was now standing, reaching out to the shadows. And it was as if the shadows were drawn to him, channelling through him, filling his mind with the horrific thoughts and images, borne from all the darkest places of the world.

He was barely aware of anything else happening around him. He heard Erich’s screams as if he was in another room. Then he was screaming too, in physical and mental anguish. Darkness consumed him and the true horror began.

Dieter woke with a start and a strangled cry. He sat bolt upright, the nightmarish vision of a host of the undead—an army—dragging their rotten bodies out of their graves and marching towards him across bleak moorland still fresh in his mind. He was drenched in sweat and there was a foul burning taste in his mouth, suggesting he had been sick. His head was pounding, as if in the grip of a stinking hangover.

As he blinked the retina-seared images of the deathly faces from his eyes, awareness of his surroundings returned and with them bewilderment, anxiety and fear. The last thing he remembered with any clarity was being crouched in the darkness under the house in Apothekar Allee, the overwhelming images of death, the black sickness filling him as the pox-ridden doktor invoked powers best left undisturbed.

What he could not remember was anything after that, other than the horrific nightmares in which the restless dead pursued him relentlessly. Dieter looked at the familiar surroundings of his room in the attic of Frau Keeler’s lodging house. He could not remember returning there.

He certainly didn’t know how he had got back. At the present time he did not even know what day it was, although from the bright summer sunshine beating in through the dormer windows the time was somewhat after nine o’ clock in the morning.

And there was so much more that he did not know. Had he and Erich been seen by Doktor Drakus as he performed his dark ritual? Whether they had or not, how could he be here now, with no memory of what had followed? They must have been seen. But if they had, how had he managed to get back to his lodgings? Had he contracted the plague from the disease-riddled man? Was the sickness taking root within him even now, condemning him to a slow, agonising death?

Had it all been a nightmare? It had seemed so realistic and yet at the same time so had his waking dream about Erich after they had first visited the house of Doktor Drakus. Had they even been to visit it a second time or had he simply dreamed it all? Dieter’s head was in a spin. He was finding it hard to trust his own senses now.

Another thought crossed his mind: where was Erich?

Dieter climbed out of bed. He was still dressed; only his cloak and boots had been removed before he went to bed. He stumbled through to the other lodger’s room. The door was closed.

Dieter knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again.

“E-Erich? Are you there?”

Nothing. Dieter tried the handle. The door was locked.

“Erich?” he called, thumping on the door with the flat of his hand.

“Go away.”

“Erich, are you all right? W-What happened last night?”

“Go away!”

“But we need to talk about this. I need to talk about what happened.”

“Go away!” Erich screamed. “Go away! Go away!”

Dieter slumped against the door and slid down it to the floor. He felt sick. The pounding of his headache was now an intense needling migraine behind his eyes that made him wince.

Cold realisation hit him. Whatever had happened beneath the house of Doktor Drakus, it had been for real. And there was one thing he was certain of, without knowing how. Something had changed within him. And he very much doubted it had changed for the better.

And it seemed that the change had not just happened inside him. Somehow the candle-flame he lit in his room that night seemed not to hold back the darkness so well. When he eventually ventured out into Bögenhafen again, the streets seemed darker around him. The whole town seemed more greatly steeped in inconstant shadows.

The world had changed irrevocably for Dieter Heydrich.

Erich did not emerge from his room for several days, not until the ninth day of Vorgeheim. In all that time Dieter himself barely left the lodging house, only going out to bring back food and drink; even then he made sure he covered his face with the cowl of his cloak, despite the foetid summer heat, in case he should be spotted by the watch and identified as a house-breaker. And if not by the watch, by other eyes with death in their cold gaze.

Dieter was afraid of contact with others and he certainly dared not return to the guild, in case word had somehow got back to them of his nefarious nighttime activities. The other students and senior members would ask too many questions, pry too deeply. And what if Drakus had secret contacts within the guild? And yet there still remained the doubt—the denial, perhaps—in the back of his mind that it had all been some horribly realistic dream.

But he had not been idle in those days of self-confinement. The books he had stolen from Drakus’ library still obsessed him, even more after what he thought he had witnessed beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Dieter filled his notebooks with what he learned, with what he was teaching himself. But he had also begun to record some of the other things he believed he had seen and beard, trying to make sense of them. He drew diagrams to represent the curious hand gestures he had witnessed—the memory of the hand movements was so clear to him, how could they be something he had simply dreamed—and he tried to write down what he had heard the doktor say. He did not even know what language Drakus had been speaking, but he persevered, writing the words phonetically.

When Erich did emerge from his room at last, stinking and unshaven, Dieter soon came to realise that a change had come over his roommate too. It showed in the diamond-sharp look in his eyes and practically all he would talk about was his new obsession with death, to the point where Dieter preferred not to speak with him anymore.

There had been a change in the mood of the populace of Bögenhafen too. There was talk amidst the townspeople of plague in nearby towns, talk that Dieter heard on those few occasions when he ventured out of the garret and the lodging house for supplies. Word was that the plague had reached as far as Kreuzotterfeld, Stimmingen and Vagenholt. Word was that the Sigmarite Templars of the Bögenhafen chapter house had been carrying out a pogrom in the surrounding villages, allegedly uncovering cells of plague-worshippers. Word was that the first cases of Sturp’s ague had been reported in Bögenhafen itself.

Dieter knew that he should have reported what he had seen—what he had thought he had seen—to the witch hunters the very next day. But it was too late now. In fact, he should have gone to the witch hunters before, after the discovery he had made in Drakus’ library or even before that, when he had witnessed the body snatchers at work. It was definitely too late now; the consequences for him were too terrible and final to contemplate. No, he would have to watch and wait this one out alone and unaided.

On the thirteenth day of the month Leopold visited him again. His excuse was that he had been sent by Professor Theodrus to find out what had befallen Dieter, to find out what was going on. Leopold received short shrift, Dieter sending him away without giving him any reason for his recent absence from the guild.

Leopold returned again four days later, insisting he be admitted and that the two apprentices tell him what was going on. On that occasion a raving Erich forcefully expelled him from the lodging house. Leopold stormed off claiming that he would be speaking to the guild and the Temple of Sigmar about the matter.

But still Dieter was plagued by doubts of his own and Erich’s lack of knowledge regarding what had happened on the night of the third day of the month. Whenever he quizzed Erich about it, he either changed the subject or claimed not to have any recollection of what had happened either. This whole state of affairs left Dieter feeling paranoid and unsettled. He had to find out what was going and what part Doktor Drakus had to play in it all, if for no other reason than for his own peace of mind. But would the truth, should he uncover it, truly bring peace of mind?

So it was that eventually, on the evening of the twenty-fifth day of Vorgeheim, with the town sheltering through the heat of high summer, Dieter ventured out of his garret hideaway and made his way through the town—avoiding the artisans’ quarter, the Nulner Weg and the Göttenplatz as much as was possible—and returned to the Temple of Shallya.

This time he asked for Anselm Fleischer by name. The plain novice priestess he spoke to knew not that the poor lunatic’s family name was Fleischer, but certainly there was a patient going by the name Anselm in their care. Dieter was glad it was not the stern matron Sister Marilda who met him. He wove a story that he was a distant cousin, come all the way from Talabheim to visit his tormented relation. He half-consciously realised that lying came more easily to him now.

The novice led Dieter back through the infirmary hall and admitted him to a different room to the one in which the poor wretch had been incarcerated before. Even after all that he had seen, the sight of the hollow-eyed, emaciated, prematurely white-haired man still came as a shock to Dieter.

Anselm was sitting on a pallet bed, clad in only a stained linen nightshirt. Dieter was somewhat surprised to see that the madman was no longer restrained by the harness jacket he had seen him wearing the first time they had met. It had been three months since, and the self-inflicted wounds on his legs had healed, after a fashion. He obviously wasn’t considered a danger to himself or others anymore.

The novice left them together, reassuring Dieter that she would not be far away if he needed her. Dieter closed the door as she left.

“Good day to you, sir,” Anselm said, fixing his visitor with a quizzical look. “Pardon me for asking, but do I know you?”

“Yes, Anselm, you do.”

He seemed quite lucid. Dieter was encouraged. Perhaps he would be more successful in this venture than he had at first hoped. Perhaps Anselm would be more receptive to his questions than he had been the last time.

“Well it is very nice to see you again, very pleasant indeed,” the lunatic beamed. “I do not receive many visitors.”

“And it is a pleasure to see you too,” Dieter said with forced joviality. He edged forwards and sat down on the end of Anselm’s bed. “Last time we spoke, you talked of your apprenticeship.”

“Did I?”

“Yes,” Dieter swallowed, his mouth suddenly thick with saliva. “At the physicians’ guild.”

“I was an apprentice there once.” Anselm smiled disarmingly, with all the innocence of a child, and all the lack of guile too.

“Yes, I know. You were under a doktor…”—he almost dared not say it—“Drakus there.”

The smile froze on Anselm’s lips. Then his face fell. “No, not him. Not him.”

“What’s the matter?” Dieter asked, as though making light of the matter.

“D-Doktor D-Dr—”

He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t bring himself to say it.

“Drakus,” Dieter finished for him.

“No!” Anselm snapped, his cry full of anguish. “Not him. Do not mention his name. He’ll find you!” Dieter sensed that the crazed creature was talking to himself again. He started to rock backwards and forwards on the bed. “He’ll come for you. He has your soul already. He’ll come for your mortal flesh as well and carve himself a new body! Physician, heal thyself!”

Dieter knew he had to act quickly before the madman’s cries alerted the priestesses to what he had done.

“What did Drakus do to you, Anselm?”

The wretch locked eyes with Dieter and stopped rocking. “He took my soul.”

“Why? How did he steal your soul?”

“He wanted my body. But all he got was my soul.” Anselm started rocking again. “I’m all right as long as I don’t die. But then I can never die. Not now. Not really. He won’t let me. And if I did, he’d only bring me back again. No, there’s no peace for you. Not now, not ever. You can’t let him find you. You can never let him find you. He has your soul. Your soul!”

His last confession became a scream. Dieter hurriedly got up from the bed in the face of the howling madman. And then Anselm was up, springing off the bed. He yanked the door open and was through it in a flash. Reacting on instinct alone, Dieter followed in the very next moment.

Ahead of him the startled cries, the screams and the howls of the madman himself, told him the whereabouts of the white-haired lunatic. He was fleeing through the infirmary, leaping over beds and barging people out of the way as he made his bid for freedom. A pair of elderly Shallyans tried to halt his flight. Anselm lashed out viciously with fists and feet. Both women were knocked flying. With a crash, a table bearing an earthenware jug and bowl was overturned. The crockery smashed on the flags.

Dieter ran after the wretch. He did not see the water that the jug and bowl had held, and which was now spilt over the infirmary floor, until his feet were slipping out from under him in the spreading puddle. He landed hard on his backside.

By the time he had managed to get back to his feet, Anselm was past all resistance and the last Dieter saw of him was his mane of white hair streaming out behind him, giving him the appearance of some exorcised apparition fleeing into the warm embrace of the night.

Amidst the ensuing chaos that followed the lunatic’s flight from the infirmary, Dieter found it easy to slip away from the Temple of Shallya himself. Once out of the courtyard precinct of the temple he turned right, away from the direction in which the guild lay—trying not to look upon the frontage of the grand Temple of Sigmar as he did so—and ducked into Handwerker Bahn. From there he secreted himself in the darkening back streets of the low class residential and commercial district that lay behind the facade of the Göttenplatz and Dreiecke Platz. He was certain that, in the wake of a dangerous lunatic escaping from the Temple of Shallya, there would be a hue and cry throughout the town. And sooner or later, the watch—or worse, the witch hunters—would doubtless become involved and Dieter did not want to find himself caught between them and their quarry, or else he might become the quarry himself.

Working his way back, roughly north-east, through the town, Dieter began to trace a path back to his lodgings, once again taking a long and circuitous indirect route. The night was unusually clear, free from fog and cloud. The veil of the sky above him was speckled with the milk drops of constellations. It was said that some sorcerers could divine meaning from the patterns the distant stars made as they travelled across the firmament of heaven, but Dieter could see nothing but the all-enveloping blackness of night.

He was half-expecting to encounter trouble on his way home, but not the sort of trouble that eventually found him. The first he knew of the ambush was when two figures—one squat and thickset, one tall and muscled like an ox—detached themselves from the shadows of a sunken doorway. He knew them at once.

Neither of the two body snatchers said a word. Neither needed to. The cudgels they held in their hands spoke their intent perfectly clearly. Was it chance that they had happened upon him or had they been hunting him all night? Did a lone scholar on his own at night present them with an easier option than ransacking a grave for a body, or was their purpose purely to do away with him?

Dieter tensed, ready to run. The two brutes took a step towards him.

Screaming like a banshee, an apparition clad in white appeared out of the darkness, bounding past Dieter and throwing itself at the shorter of the two grave robbers.

The man staggered backwards and lost his footing as Anselm Fleischer landed on him, ripping open the man’s leather tunic and sinking his nails into the body snatcher’s chest and shoulder. He fell backwards onto the muck splattered cobbles. Anselm gave a feral snarl and sank his teeth into the man’s neck. Blood flowed. The grave robber cried out in anger and pain, trying to beat the madman from him.

“Physician, heal thyself!” the madman growled through a mouthful of flesh.

Confounded by this totally unexpected counter-attack, the larger brute simply watched dumbfounded as the lunatic savaged his companion like some feral beast.

Dieter did not wait to see what happened next. He turned tail and ran.

Dieter stopped, panting for breath, hands on his knees. He had no idea where he had run to nor for how long. As he began to recover himself he looked up to see a familiar street sign. He was back at Apothekar Allee again. Doktor Drakus’ abode stood before him. Where it had seemed deathly before there was now something empty about its appearance.

As if his feet had a mind and intent all of their own, Dieter approached the door of the house. It stood slightly ajar. All thought of his visit to the infirmary-temple, the lunatic’s escape and his encounter with the body snatchers was suddenly gone. He put a hand to the door, just as he had done in his dream, and with a moan of seized hinges it swung open before him.

Then he was inside the house, at the top of the slime-slick steps leading down into the tomb-cold basement, then at the bottom of the steps, then at the threshold to the laboratory chamber. And there he saw—

Nothing. The vault was utterly bare, apart from the abandoned lantern. Then, its oil used up at last, the light flickered and died.

Dieter ran back up the stairs into the house. Up to the first floor and into the library; at least where there had once been a library. The books were missing too. The house had been cleared out utterly. And Doktor Drakus was gone.

NACHGEHEIM

Murder Most Foul

I can still remember the first time I took another man’s life, as clearly as if it happened only yesterday.

There have been so many since. The templar knight, the desperate street-walker, the mercenary soldier, the naive priest, the scolding fishwife, the leech-thing and his elemental creation the coarse sexton, the half-drunk militiamen, the pompous burgomeister, the guildsman, my own apprentice, the whiskered rat-catcher, the twin innocents, the grave robber, the avaricious thief. I could go on. But I still remember the first.

I can see his face now, as I squeezed the life from him. I can see the bulging, bloodshot eyes, the protruding swollen tongue, the puffed cheeks turning from red to purple. I can hear the spluttering, rasping gargle of the man choking, gasping for breath that would never come. I feel his desperate hands clawing at mine, the nails ripping through the skin into my flesh. And I feel my hands closing tighter and tighter about his neck, crushing his windpipe. I feel the bones of his neck grating against each other.

And I remember how it made me feel. The horror, the disbelief, the fear, the desperation, the panic, the unreality of it, the disconnectedness. The adrenalin rush. The sick excitement. The power.

Looking back now I realise that having taken that step, I was damned forever. I had passed the point of no return. There was no going back. There would be no forgiveness. No redemption. From that moment on, although I tried to fight it, my fate was already sealed.

Once the first steps are taken along that dark path, there is no going back.

Dieter Heydrich was there to witness the cold-blooded murder of Anselm Fleischer when the witch hunters executed the lunatic for the sacrilegious crimes committed by the Corpse Taker.

The execution took place on the one night of the year, above all others, when anyone who valued their life or their sanity stayed at home. It was the night when dark things were abroad within the world. It was the Night of Mystery. Geheimnisnacht.

In certain remote villages and hamlets across the Empire, where people more readily suffered the predations of the servants of darker powers, the populace would bar themselves in until the sun rose on the first day of Nachgeheim, for fear of what might be abroad on that night.

This Geheimnisnacht was an uncomfortable, sweltering night. The day had been the same, the atmosphere oppressive, ever promising thunder but the weather never delivering on that promise. The oppressive atmosphere remained as night fell, as did the humid heat.

The bells of the Temple of Sigmar chimed nine o’ clock. Both moons hung in the light-leeched sky, full and threatening, directly above the pyre constructed outside the temple in the Göttenplatz. The fissured face of green-hazed Morrslieb even appeared to be smiling like a feral predator.

Although people knew better than to be out on Geheimnisnacht, they had still come in their droves to see the Corpse Taker burn at the stake, the bogeyman of their nightmares laid to rest at last.

The crowd pointed at the two moons and muttered amongst themselves, making the sign of the holy hammer or touching iron to guard against evil. But still they had come.

The capture of the Corpse Taker had been the talk of the town for the last week, so much so that even Dieter, hiding away in his garret study, had come to hear of it. He had heard how the lunatic had been captured by a cadre of Sigmarites, led by Brother-Captain Krieger himself, the madman having attacked the town’s sextons, who tended the graves for Father Hulbert in the garden of Morr, following his escape from the Temple of Shallya. Krieger had not been as understanding as either the physicians’ guild or the Sisters of Shallya. Dieter had heard that Anselm Fleischer had been subjected to the torturers’ ministrations following which he had confessed to being the Corpse Taker and of having committed all the crimes of which he’d been accused, and more still.

His death had been inevitable, not only from that point when he had admitted to every accusation the witch hunters made against him, Dieter thought, but from the moment he had been seized by the Order of Sigmar; perhaps from the moment he had broken free from the infirmary to escape Dieter’s interrogation. Surely his death warrant had been written from the moment his will had been turned by the malevolent Doktor Drakus, working away behind the scenes of this morality play all along—seemingly directing everything that was happening to Dieter even. That was the way fate worked.

It had been Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger and not fate, however, who had decided that the Corpse Taker should be put to death on Geheimnisnacht. Many, even among the Church of Sigmar, riled at the idea. Krieger was as superstitious and as fearful as the next man, it was the message that he was giving that was important. The fact that the fiend who had terrorised Bögenhafen for the best part of nine months would perish on Geheimnisnacht would be a sign to all other malefactors and evildoers that they would have no power over Sigmar-fearing men, even on the treacherous Night of Mystery.

Dieter hung back at the edge of the square, cloaked and hooded despite the warm night. Moving from foot to foot he could see what was taking place on the other side of the Göttenplatz.

Anselm Fleischer wasn’t the only one to suffer the judgement of the witch hunters that night. Two others were to be put to the torch: an overweight merchant and his unnatural youthful lover. Their unholy lascivious union had been declared an act of dedication to the blasphemous Prince of Pleasure.

The dignitaries of the faith of the Heldenhammer were also there. The citizens of Bögenhafen who were in attendance were from all walks of life and all levels of society, including members of the town council as well as representatives of the guilds, to see that Sigmar’s will was done.

Dieter saw Professor Theodrus there too, keen to show he condoned the action taken against Anselm Fleischer, and thereby disassociating himself and the guild from the madman’s crimes. Dieter pulled the hood of his cloak further over his face, just in case somehow, amidst the sea of faces, Theodrus was able to pick him out.

Krieger stood proudly next to the much less impressive figure of the Lector of Sigmar, a blazing brand in his leather-gloved hand, ready to set the fires of divine retribution himself. Before Sigmar’s will was enacted, the lector mumbled something spiritual to the condemned and blessed the masses observing the whole perverse ritual.

The three heretic criminals did not accept their fate with good grace, accepting their sins and seeing this as an opportunity to be cleansed of their wickedness. Anselm thrashed and riled against the ropes that bound him, calling on the secret masters of the undead and even grinning Morrslieb to deliver him. His madness had utterly consumed him at last.

Hearing his poisonous blasphemies the crowd responded in kind, calling to the witch hunter captain to finish his work here and send the Corpse Taker to join the Dark Powers he venerated in the world beyond.

The younger of the other two heretics sobbed and wailed hysterically. The merchant said nothing: the ordeals he had endured to extract his confession having practically killed him already. He sagged limply in his bindings, his chin hanging down on his chest, either unconscious or catatonic.

And then something happened that chilled Dieter’s blood and made his heart skip a beat.

It seemed to Dieter that of all the hundreds of people thronging the Göttenplatz, Anselm, tied to the stake atop the pyre, fixed him with his mad-eyed gaze. The madman’s words echoed from the temple buildings crowding the square, and over the heads of the people gathered there, as though he were speaking directly to him.

“Physician, heal thyself!”

They were the last words Anselm Fleischer ever spoke.

Dieter was sure that Anselm Fleischer could not be the Corpse Taker. How could he have carried out all the morbid things the Corpse Taker was accused of when he had been kept a virtual prisoner in a cell within the Temple of Shallya, watched day and night by the priestesses who served there? And it certainly hadn’t been Anselm Fleischer who Dieter had watched performing some unspeakable rite in the vault under the house in Apothekar Allee.

As Dieter watched Anselm burn and listened to his inhuman screams, the physician’s apprentice felt numb, as though a part of himself had died. But better that Anselm die, a wretched insane fool with nothing to live for, than Dieter Heydrich.

The effete Chaos-worshipper cried out for pity as the flames rose until the spark-blown smoke choked his lungs. Greasy black smoke eventually obscured the victims of Krieger’s brutal justice. The flames crackled and spat as the bodies crisped and blackened. The stink of over-cooked spit-roast meat which assaulted his nostrils made Dieter gag involuntarily.

The execution over, the crowd quickly dispersed, the townsfolk reasoning that it was not wise to tempt fate any longer on the night of Geheimnisnacht, and set off for home. Dieter did the same although his motivations were more inspired by not wanting to attract the attentions of Brother-Captain Krieger. If the witch hunter had a mind to, it would not be difficult for him to connect Dieter to the wrongly executed Anselm Fleischer.

Dieter reached Frau Keeler’s lodging house as the temple bells were chiming ten. In the darkness his foot brushed against something furred and damp. Dieter paused and took a step back.

The eerie luminescence of the twin moons illuminated even the gloom of Dunst Strasse, the monotone light bleeding all colour from the object, but it was unmistakable nonetheless.

Erich’s cat lay dead in the road. Its lank body was distended unnaturally. Sticky black blood matted its spiked ginger fur where a cartwheel had crushed its body.

Seeing such an incongruous sight distracted Dieter for a moment from his own preoccupations and concerns. Erich would be distraught. For some inexplicable reason he doted on the mangy stray.

Dieter bent down and gathered up the animal’s body in his cloak. The rank acrid smell of the dead cat assaulted his nostrils more sharply than the smell of burning pig-fat had in the square.

Dieter entered the quiet house and ascended the stairs to the attic room. The garret was in darkness other than for the penetrating glow of the Geheimnisnacht moons that permeated everywhere. The door to Erich’s room was closed. An empty wine bottle and glass stood on the table in the central living space of the apartment.

Erich had not joined Dieter to watch the execution of the Corpse Taker for he knew as well as Dieter that the real villain was still at large, and probably still somewhere within the town. He had become even more of a recluse than Dieter, spending most of his time locked away inside his room, only venturing out to rummage for scraps and eat the leftovers of Dieter’s meals. When he did go out, Dieter knew that he drank even harder than he had when they had first met.

Dieter’s first thought was to take the dead cat to Erich and let him know the fate of his pet.

But then another thought slithered in to his mind, from out of the darkness in which his mind was locked.

Dieter turned instead towards his own door, the cat’s corpse still held in the folds of his cloak. He entered his room, where the stub of a candle still flickered fitfully, and laid the cat carefully down on his workbench, clearing a space amidst all the papers and dissection instruments.

He removed his cloak and sat down in the chair at the bench, his eyes never once moving from the mangled remains of the cat. The indistinct darkness that lingered at the corners of the room thickened, the shadows pressing in more closely towards him. Despite what he was intending to do, Dieter’s pulse remained steady, and his breathing remained calm.

Since the night in Apothekar Allee he had not been able to shake the feeling that something within him had changed. It was as if something had been woken within him, a strange power that now longed to be unleashed.

The aftermath of what he had witnessed that night surrounded him now, recorded in notebooks and on disorganised scraps of paper; even in the dissections he had continued with under the guidance of Leichemann’s Anatomy. But he tried to ignore all that now, pushing it to one side.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on clearing his mind. There he found images of Anselm Fleischer’s corpse burning at the stake with the other heretics, the pox-ridden face of Doktor Drakus that haunted his dreams, and memories of all that had changed in his life since he had come to Bögenhafen.

And steadily the images faded until his mind was a dark and empty void. There, at the heart of the darkness, something writhed and uncoiled, something even blacker and darker still. An unknown, untold power. A previously unrealised ability. An affinity for the oblivion of death and all the dead places of the world.

Other memories returned, unfolding in his mind. He felt a rush of excitement but tempered it with anxious anticipation. He didn’t want to lose hold of what was awakening inside him. He let it come naturally. By not concentrating on trying to recall the words and gestures Doktor Drakus had used as he had called on the powers that dwelt beyond the veil of mortality, those remembrances came all the more readily. Images from the pages of the books he had stolen from the doktor’s library took on three-dimensional form in his mind’s eye.

An anatomical rendering of a human skull. The arteries and veins extruded from a man’s arm. A frog dissection, the amphibian’s organs pinned out on the board beside it.

Subconsciously Dieter stretched out his flattened palms, fingers splayed, over the prone body of the cat and began to mimic the gestures Drakus had made, shaping the air with his hands. He heard the words of Drakus’ invocation. His lips moved in imitation of the sounds, and then he was saying them, his voice low and barely audible, not understanding their meaning but fully understanding their purpose.

And now he could hear another sound. An insect sound; an insistent susurration. Voices whispering in another room. He could feel the skeletal fingers of a breeze ruffling his unkempt, uncut hair. He kept his eyes closed, in case by opening them he might somehow dispel the power he was now invoking. He breathed deeply and inhaled a curious scent, borne on the unseen wind. The smell of leaf-mulch, of mould, of damp earth. Of the grave.

The liquefying candle fizzled and blew out, as the blast of another esoteric squall gusted through the shadow-clad room. The wind felt cold. Dieter was sweating, but he knew that it was more than simply the warmth of the night that was producing such a physiological response. In fact there was a distinct chill in the air. There were supernatural forces at work in this place now.

Dieter could feel the change within him even more strongly now, and he welcomed it. He had never felt like this before in his life as the painfully shy, insecure, downtrodden and victimised underdog. So charged, so energised, so in control. So powerful.

And now he did open his eyes. A small part of him was surprised that the room was not in total darkness. A pallid luminescence bathed the workbench and the broken body of the cat in its wan grey light. It seemed to Dieter that the source of this strange light was not merely the moons, visible clearly now through the dormer window. It seemed to suffuse the very air around him and shimmer from his hands. The strange light created sinister flickering shadows so that he did not at first register the spasm of movement on the desk beneath his outstretched hands. But he heard the spitting hiss quite clearly and knew immediately what it was.

In a flurry of scratching claws and bared, glistening teeth, the cat returned to hissing life. The spitting stray pushed itself up on its front legs and turned narrowed, burning red eyes on Dieter. He felt a thrill of fearful excitement sizzle through him. But at the same time he dared not lose concentration; he kept his mind focused.

The cat’s back legs kicked, unsheathed claws scratching splinters from the surface of the bench. Its tail lashed angrily. It was unable to stand. Dieter might have managed to return the creature to life but he had not repaired its body first. The cat’s back was still broken, its midriff still a mess of mashed flesh and pulped internal entrails.

The cat began to yowl, a hollow, menacing sound, rising from within its shattered ribcage to become a wailing scream. Its ears lay flat against its head, its matted bloody fur standing on end.

What he was witnessing before him defied belief. A creature that had been properly dead had been brought back to life. Admittedly it was a demented, pain-wracked, hate-filled form of life, but it was life nonetheless. And Dieter was the one who had brought it about. He knew that the blasphemous truth was that it was his will alone that was keeping the cat alive.

At the edges of his mind he saw flashes of mortality made flesh. The maggot-eaten carcass of a magpie. The deathcap fungus grown bulbous on the stump of a dead elm. Kittens drowned in a millpond. Old Gelda tied to the fence post, bundles of sticks piled at her feet.

The door to his room banged open. Dieter’s concentration was broken. The cat gave one last fading yowl as its lungs deflated and slumped back down onto the tabletop.

Dieter sat back in his chair, only then realising how tense his body had been as he channelled the eldritch powers that had brought a semblance of life where there should have been none. Every muscle ached. He was sweating even more heavily now. His skin felt cold and clammy and he was left with a nauseous headache.

He slowly turned his head and saw Erich standing in the doorway, open-mouthed shock painted on the horrified canvas of his face. For a moment neither of them said anything. Dieter was too busy panting for breath. Erich was simply too appalled to speak.

Dieter’s roommate did not need to explain what he was doing there. If anyone needed to explain anything it was Dieter. But nonetheless it was Erich, still standing at the threshold to Dieter’s room, not daring to cross it, who first spoke.

“I-I heard the cat. It was howling. I-I wondered what had happened to it.”

Dieter looked back at the body on his desk. The front of the ginger stray hung limply over the edge of the table.

“Well, now you know,” he said.

Erich looked from Dieter to the cat and back again, the same appalled expression of horror etched on his features. “H-How?” was all he could manage.

“I don’t rightly know…” Dieter admitted, mystified by the experience himself. He could feel the former power he had enjoyed ebbing from him now, leaving behind it feelings of exhaustion, confusion and emptiness.

Other thoughts began to fill the gaping hole, such as how Erich would be feeling about the death of his cat, what he now thought of the naive country boy and whether he would give Dieter up to the witch hunters.

And then Erich made a declaration that Dieter certainly hadn’t been expecting.

“Then you must find out how.”

“What?”

“It is clear you have a talent, a gift. You cannot waste it. You should use it.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?” Now it was Dieter who was the one who sounded appalled.

“J-Just think about it.” The horrified expression was fast becoming a rictus of manic excitement. A mad gleam had entered Erich’s eyes. “Ever since I met you, you have been driven by a passion, an all-consuming desire to help people, to heal them, to save them from the merciless hand of fate. And now you have developed a gift that could help you accomplish your dream. Just think, with such a talent you could help the ailing better than anybody else. You could conquer death itself. Nobody would have to suffer the loss you did, as a child, when your mother died.”

Erich’s voice was thick with the same syrupy tone he had used the night he had persuaded Dieter to lead him to the deathly house in Apothekar Allee.

“You must practise your talents, develop them. I could help you. I could help you prepare your experiments; bring you what you needed, prepare your compounds. Whatever you need.”

Dieter riled at the thought that he should take what he had accomplished this night any further. But there was something about Erich’s suggestion that excited him. There was something deep inside him, close to the very core of his being, that revelled in the suggestion.

For a moment Dieter sensed a tingling aftershock of the power he had felt as he weaved his hands in the air above the dead cat, like a puppet master working a marionette, only without the aid of strings.

He did not hear the heresy against Morr present in Erich’s words, that he could conquer death. He only heard that he would have the power to reverse the fatal effects of death.

“You have a duty to all those whose lives you will save to do this. You have been given great power—the gods Know why—and with such power comes an even greater responsibility.”

Ambivalent emotions vied for dominance within Dieter. His overwrought mind raced with it all. One moment he wanted to shout and laugh in exhilaration, the next he was ready to burst into tears. But the one overwhelming feeling he had, which steadily quelled all the other emotions, was the heady feeling of intoxication. He felt drunk with power.

Then another, inevitable thought pushed its way to the surface of the fathomless black pool that was his mind.

“I wonder. I wonder,” he said breathlessly, almost thinking aloud.

Erich looked at him transfixed, waiting on his every word. The darkness writhed and spun around him. Shadows cast by the glowing moons became clawing hands pulling themselves across the wall towards the manic apprentice standing in the doorway.

“If I can bring a cat back to life, I wonder if I could do the same with something larger. What if…” a crazed giggle suddenly escaped his lips. “What if I could do what Drakus was obviously attempting to do?” He was shaking. “What if I could bring a human being back from the dead?”

Silence hung in the cloying air between them like a leaden pendulum. Dieter fancied he could detect the distant smell of desert-dry spices and carrion.

“But where would I begin? Where could I get a body from?”

Erich looked at him darkly and the chill in the room intensified still further.

“I’m sure something could be arranged,” he said.

* * *

It was Erich who found the warehouse and Albrecht Heydrich’s money that paid the rent. The building stood towards the western end of the Ostendamm, a dilapidated dockside barn that smelt of mouldy hops and rancid beer. It had not been used for some time.

The warehouse had an overweight landlord who smell little better. Dieter had learned months ago that Erich was the kind of person who had mutual acquaintances who knew such people. The man was too drunk most of the time to even know what day it was so he cared even less who took on the lease for the property. He certainly wasn’t going to bother checking the credentials of those he was renting it to, or follow up on what they were doing there.

For Dieter had become a man obsessed. He realised that he had been a blinkered fool before, blind to the possibilities that this radical branch of natural philosophy presented. Motivated by the adrenaline surge of power he had felt and encouraged by the equally obsessive Erich, he had become driven to learn all he could about his newly awakened powers and hone them.

But before he could do that he realised that preparation was key. He was also not so caught up in his studies to forget that not everyone would look upon what he was trying to do so favourably. In fact it would be positively dangerous to continue his experiments in Frau Keeler’s lodging house, especially if he were to attempt to resurrect a human being from the dead if he and Erich could acquire a corpse. For what better way could there be to learn how to cure the living of their ills than by studying the dead to ascertain precisely what it was that had killed them? And then to take it one step further, having determined the actual cause of death, to make alterations to the corpse and then resurrect it to see what difference the procedure had made.

Dieter was as desperate now to find a way to stop people being claimed by death and disease as when he had first been able to give a name to the desire that had grown within him after his mother had been so cruelly taken from him at such a young age. And if he could he would even turn back the clock to prevent his father from dying, He might not have been the more caring and compassionate father in the world but he had been his flesh and Mood nonetheless. And if not for himself he would have done it for his dear sister Katarina.

He hadn’t heard from her for several weeks now, although it might have simply been that he had not noticed if she had written to him or not, so caught up had he been in the events following the epiphany he had received under the house in Apothekar Allee.

Once he would have agonised about what his sister would have thought of what he was doing, of what he had become. When he had first arrived in Bögenhafen six months before, not a day had gone by without him thinking of his sister and offering up a prayer to Morr to watch over her and not take her into his realm for many a year yet. Now barely a day went by when he did think of her. And he no longer prayed to Morr either. His mind was on other things.

So it was that Dieter, assisted by his fellow apprentice, began to carry out his own experiments into the power that had awoken within him, to test his newly discovered abilities. Their days became nights, their nights days, Dieter attempting to copy what he could remember the sinister Doktor Drakus doing.

He began small. He had to try for consistency and control. Judging by his first few attempts to raise frogs and rats he still had a long way to go. He was not ready to attempt the resurrection of a human being yet.

The things he did reanimate lived only briefly, or their movements were unnaturally sluggish, or they were unnaturally aggressive and violent. Other times he could not raise the vermin Erich had collected at all but merely caused their bodies to decay more rapidly as the conjured death energies took their toll.

And he was yet to recapture the ease with which he had summoned his power to revive the cat. Perhaps it had been something about Geheimnisnacht itself that had made the task seem so simple at the time.

His dreams became darker. But surely, he told himself, that was merely an adjustment to his newfound gift.

He filled notebook after notebook with what he discovered by lamplight each night. It had been weeks since either Dieter or Erich had attended a lecture at the guild. They slept at Frau Keeler’s lodging house during the day venturing out as dusk was casting its smoky shadows over the town to make their surreptitious way to the warehouse on Ostendamm. And they took a different route each night, sometimes doubling back on themselves, so as not to be followed and escape detection. There they would work without stopping until the first glimmers of pre-dawn light began to bleach the velvet darkness from the sky.

And so they continued as Nachgeheim matured. But the world beyond the insular world of darkness that the two of them had created continued to turn and by the twelfth of the month, the plague was already well established in Bögenhafen.

Word was that it arose in the area to the north of the river known as the Pit and took hold as readily in the Fort Blackfire guard barracks as in the slums of the Westendamm.

The Pit had always been a festering hotbed of infection. Sanitation in this part of the town was worse than in any other district and disease there was rife. It was a breeding ground for all manner of maladies and agues. It was an area of the town that members of the physicians’ guild avoided visiting if at all possible—they certainly didn’t have any paying clients living on that side of the river—and that fact alone might well have allowed the spread of the plague to go unchecked for several weeks at least.

By the time the authorities had put measures in place to prevent the spread of the plague within the town—boarding up the homes of those already infected and marking them with a red cross so that others would know to steer well clear, and restricting traffic across the river—it was already too little too late.

The physicians’ guild and the Sisterhood of Shallya were drafted in to help with the rapidly worsening crisis. Those who could afford to quit the town in panic. The watch stepped up its patrols in the richer parts of the town, protecting their own best interests by making sure that the homes and businesses of the town’s wealthy patrons did not fall prey to looters, but, as a consequence, leaving the poorer parts of the town to their own devices.

There were more burnings in the Göttenplatz as those accused by the witch hunters of spreading the sickness intentionally, to draw down the favour of the Dark Gods upon them, were put to death.

But to Dieter and Erich it was as if nothing catastrophic had happened. In fact, if anything, it made it easier for them to go about their business undisturbed and, even more importantly, unobserved. Due to the crippling effects of the plague on the Blackfire barracks, the watch were soon hard pushed to maintain their observance of the areas around the Adel Ring and the commercial districts off the Bergstrasse and the Nulner Weg. They certainly weren’t concerned with what went on around the docks. After all, barges were no longer stopping in Bögenhafen, instead pressing on for Altdorf, it being common knowledge now that there was plague in the town. But then river traffic was down by fifty per cent compared to the same time the previous year, so greatly was the Reikland in the grip of what the physicians’ guild had termed the black pox. The streets around the Ostendamm were practically empty. There was only the occasional beggar, dead in the street.

Although the numbers out and about on the streets had drastically reduced, the numbers attending the temples had doubled as those who had chosen to stay, or who had no choice but to stay, sought divine intervention against the plague. Many, such as the Sisters of Mercy of Shallya, believed it was a punishment visited upon the population in retribution for the sinful lives they led. Some blamed it on the events of Geheimnisnacht.

Work increased for the physicians’ guild, the Sisterhood and the mourners’ guild as the dead soon choked the town cemetery. By the twenty-third day of Nachgeheim people were dying more quickly than Father Hulbert and the gravediggers could bless and bury them. Some claimed that bodies —particularly those of the poor—were going into mass unconsecrated graves, unblessed.

Dieter and Erich took their own precautions against the plague, carrying nosegays about their person to mask the stench of death permeating the town and helping to keep the black pox from them. But then as the two of them hardly had any contact with anyone other than each other, they reasoned that their chances of infection were dramatically reduced. The lingering thought that he might still contract the plague simply motivated Dieter to press on with his new studies, and to persist with his experiments, for his work might mean that he found a way of beating the disease or of even finding a cure.

It was on the twenty-ninth day of the month that Dieter heard from his sister again. Returning to his lodgings that morning he was surprised and suspicious to see an unkempt young man standing at the door to Frau Keeler’s tenement, note in hand.

He considered waiting to see if the stranger would leave of his own accord but it wasn’t just the world that had changed; Dieter had changed with it. Whereas before the old Dieter might have been happy to hang back and avoid any confrontation, he now stepped forward confidently and challenged the youth.

“What is your business here?” he said.

“I have a message,” the young man replied, pressing the letter into Dieter’s hand.

Dieter looked at the crumpled envelope in his hand, then at the scruffy messenger.

“Good day to you,” he said. “That will be all.”

He admitted himself to the building and slammed the door shut behind him.

Dieter did not open the letter until he was in his own room in the garret. For a moment he had entertained all sorts of paranoid ideas as to who had sent him the letter on seeing the state of its deliverer. But these had been dispelled when he saw his name and the address of the lodging house written in his sister’s familiar hand, to be replaced by long-buried feelings of guilt, loss and longing.

With a pang in his heart, Dieter sat down on the end of his unmade bed, tore open the letter, and read.

My dearest brother,

I do hope that this letter finds you well. Only I fear that it will not, that something terrible has befallen you. I pray to Morr daily that it has not and that he might spare you a while yet. But in my dreams I see such terrible things, things I dare not recount here lest by the act of putting them to paper I invoke whatever it is that dwells in the darkness of my dreams and make them come true.

What has happened to you? I have not heard from you now in months. And now word reaches Hangenholz that there is plague in Bögenhafen!

Please come home, I beg of you. Hangenholz is clean, and everyone is doing all they can to make sure that it remains so. Hangenholz is your home. It is where you belong, with me.

This letter comes with all my love and every day I will pray that it reaches you, finding you safe and well, and that you heed my plea. Please respond. Please come home.

Your devoted Katarina

Frustrated anger and obstinacy welled up within Dieter. He understood that his darling sister had his best intentions at heart, that her anxiety was born out of love for her distracted brother, but did she not realise that he was doing it for her, for all people, but especially for her? Could she not see that there was no way he could abandon his studies now, at such a critical juncture.

Annoyed that such concerns—although well meant—were interrupting his work, Dieter penned a reply immediately, hoping that in doing so he might calm himself by working out some of his frustrations in the writing of it.

My dearest sister,

Thank you for your letter and your concerns, but do not fret. I am well and, after all, an apprentice of the physicians’ guild. The plague will not touch me. Besides, I am sure that the reality is not as bad as the rumours and half-truths that you have heard. The stories that have reached as far as Hangenholz will have been exaggerated with every mile of the road they have travelled.

I bless you for your love and prayers: It makes all the difference knowing that you are there for me and thinking of me as I labour at my studies here.

But that is why I cannot come home, not yet. I feel that I am close to a breakthrough now, one that will mean people might never fall victim to such cruel diseases as the black pox ever again. So you see that I cannot quit my work here.

And I in turn beg of you, do not come looking for me. You were right to remain in Hangenholz when I left after our late father’s funeral. Remain there now where it is safe, where this accursed plague cannot touch you.

I remain your loving brother,

Dieter

Dieter sealed the letter and laid it on top of his workbench. He stretched and yawned. He felt so bone-numbingly tired and yet, at the same, his mind was constantly racing, swelling every day with all that he was learning and discovering about his gift. He would sleep now—fitfully, probably, beset by dreams that once he might have termed nightmares—and at dusk, when he left for the warehouse again, he would deliver the letter to the Reisehauschen to be taken to Hangenholz.

No, he stubbornly refused to leave Bögenhafen, not unless it became absolutely necessary. His work was here. And he was actually starting to get somewhere. He would not—could not—abandon his studies now.

That night Erich and Dieter, having delivered his letter to the coaching inn, met at the dilapidated warehouse on the Ostendamm again. There was now a distinctive autumnal bite in the air after the sun had set, suggesting that the seasons were on the turn again. In all too little lime the rot of autumn would give way to winter and the dead months of the year. A chilling wind blew in under the wooden-banded doors and whistled between the slates of the roof above the hayloft.

Laid out around them was a scene not unlike that which had greeted them in the basement of Doktor Drakus’ house. Trestle tables were covered with Dieter’s open notebooks. A workbench bore the tools of a barber-surgeon. And in the middle of it all was a heavy oak table, ready to be transformed into an autopsy table when the opportunity arose.

Erich had “acquired” much of the equipment and Dieter had chosen not to ask how. Dieter had simply told him what he needed and Erich had found it for him. Around all of it was erected a sackcloth curtain so that should someone unexpected find their way into the warehouse, they would not immediately see what it was being used for.

They had moved Dieter’s things from Dunst Strasse over the course of several evenings, so as to again try to avoid arousing anyone’s suspicions or attracting unwanted attention by wheeling a cart through the town laden with books and bizarre pieces of equipment.

Behind where Dieter’s temporary laboratory had been set up, towards the back of the musty warehouse, a trapdoor covered the pit into which the results of Dieter’s previous experiments had been dropped: vermin, amphibians and the like that he had managed to give life to again, an unlife that they had somehow clung on to and which had told Dieter he was ready for the next stage, to attempt something more impressive, to transfer the skills he had learnt. The inhabitants of the pit burped and flopped, croaked and chattered, splashed and scratched in the dank, lightless hole.

Dieter was under no illusion that it would be much harder to bring a human being back to life; a human being was so much more complex a creation than a frog or a fish. But it was not an impossible task to achieve. And it was that matter he and Erich were discussing when they were interrupted.

“So where do we get our corpse?” Dieter was asking.

“T-That shouldn’t be too hard with a plague decimating the town populace,” Erich gurgled.

In the last few months a dramatic change had come over Erich as well. When Dieter had first got to know him, months ago now, he had wanted to be more like the confident, rebellious Erich. And now he was, only Erich had become something less than the naive priest’s son from the country, who had first arrived in Bögenhafen wanting to change the world.

“But it can’t be just any body. Not for the first time. I don’t want one that’s too badly disfigured by the disease or that has been left to rot for too long. I certainly don’t want anything from one of those lime-slaked grave pits they’ve dug out beyond Morr’s field.”

Dieter had collated and combined the knowledge he had uncovered from the undoubtedly proscribed books he had taken from Drakus’ library with what he had taught himself and discovered from actually using his powers. And having been surrounded by death from an early age, he knew what he needed.

“W-We could ask the doktor’s b-body snatchers. The sexton and his f-friend,” Erich stammered. An insane glimmer flashed in Erich’s eyes. “I k-know where I can f-find them.”

“Very well. But you know my demands,” Dieter said, “and be subtle about it.”

Both Dieter and Erich jumped as the sackcloth curtain was suddenly yanked back.

“So this is where you’ve got to!”

“Leopold!” Dieter exclaimed.

Leopold Hanser stood before them now, wearing a long leather coat, the posy-packed bird-beaked mask of a plague-doktor under one arm, an appalled expression on his face. Magnanimous as ever, he had obviously been out doing what he could to halt the spread of the terrible disease besetting the town.

“I wondered what had happened to you and then when I saw this wretch”—he pointed at Erich—“skulking his way along the Bergstrasse as I went about my guild-appointed business, I decided to follow him and find out, thinking he might lead me to you. And sure enough he has.”

“I-lt’s not what you think,” Erich said suddenly, leaping between Dieter and Leopold.

“What are you doing? Why are you protecting him?”

Leopold moved and glanced at what he saw laid out before him again.

“Dieter, what in Shallya’s name are you going to do here?” Leopold looked at him with pleading eyes, worry etched in every line of his furrowed brow. “I thought I heard you talking about body snatchers and a corpse and now I see tools laid out as though for an autopsy.”

Dieter said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. Shame, anger, frustration and doubt were all welling up inside him; ambivalent emotions battling for dominance.

The look of worry on Leopold’s face became one of horror as he took a step forward into the operating theatre-cum-laboratory space.

“And why would you have to do this here? Why not at the guild?” he was practically thinking aloud now.

“W-We’re not doing anything here!” Erich was panicking.

“Unless what you’re planning is proscribed by the guild.” Leopold turned to Dieter again. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you wouldn’t do such a thing, Dieter.”

Dieter opened his mouth to speak, but still couldn’t find the words.

“By all the gods! I thought the templars had burnt the fiend at the stake but it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Corpse Taker, Dieter, aren’t you?”

Leopold barged past Dieter and picked up a notebook, open at a page on which Dieter had attempted to record the invocation he had heard Drakus make over the gutted corpse in his cellar, underneath drawings of the hand gestures he had made.

“This is sorcery,” Leopold gasped. “Witchcraft. By my oath, you’re necromancers!”

A cold chill settled in the pit of Dieter’s stomach. He was not that. He would not be called that. They were an anathema to all he stood for. He wanted to save lives, not end them, and that was what necromancers sought to do, to bring an end to all things in the name of their dark lords of undeath.

“We are not necromancers!” Erich screeched.

“I’ll have to alert the witch hunters. It’s for your own good, for the good of Bögenhafen. By Shallya, it could be your work here that has brought this damned plague upon the town!”

Leopold sounded hysterical now.

“You will not go to them! We are not necromancers!” Erich shrieked, bearing down on Leopold arms outstretched, hands become grasping claws. “You will not! Or I’ll… I’ll…”

“What?” Leopold challenged, backing away from the advancing maniac. “Or you’ll what?”

Leopold backed into Dieter. He gasped and turned around, surprised. His panicked eyes met the cold, glassy orbs of Dieter’s.

Hands closed around Leopold’s neck. Dieter’s hands.

He was not a necromancer. He would not have anyone call him that!

His grip tightened. Leopold’s eyes bulged. His fat tongue protruded from his mouth.

He would not have anyone call him that.

Leopold’s face turned from red to vein-bulging purple. His desperate hands pulled on Dieter’s wrists, clawed at Dieter’s steely grip, tore the skin until the blood ran. Desperate feet kicked against his shins.

Erich hung back, giggling.

He was not a necromancer.

A strangled sound rose from somewhere within Leopold that a part of Dieter realised could only be his death rattle, for how could anyone living make such an inhuman, rasping sound?

He was not that.

Beneath the flesh squeezed between his fingers, Dieter felt bones shift and grate.

Then there was silence, and Leopold stopped struggling. His body sagged. In fact there was no movement at all. Dieter let go and Leopold’s body fell to the warehouse floor.

Erich capered from foot to foot, dancing a macabre jig. His cackling swelled to full-blown maniacal laughter.

Dieter just stood there, the colour draining from his cheeks. What had he done? He had killed a man. But more than that, he had murdered the man he had once considered to be his best, possibly his only, true friend.

Erich looked from the cooling corpse of Leopold Hanser to the white-faced Dieter Heydrich and smiled. It was a sick smile that in the lantern-light contorted his face into a grotesque daemonic visage.

“Well, now we have our body,” he chuckled.

ERNTEZEIT

Resurrection Men

Let me tell you a little about the nature of that which you would vulgarly call “magic”. I have never liked that word for it so poorly describes the interplay of the energies of the otherworld upon our own physical realm.

Those who are blessed with the ability to harness and influence the flow and flux of these energies do not see the world as you mere mortals do. Our minds exist in the everyday world of shadows and the blazing eldritch world of the ethereal at the same time. This is true of all wizards, including those who practise the lore of death.

The malevolent energies employed by the Dark Art are easily the most dangerous form of sorcery but some would also say the most potent. Certainly it is the great adversary of the noblest most pure form of the Ars Magicae. But do not misunderstand me: the Dark Art is also, at its height, pure. It is the pure antithesis of High Magic, being the most purely corrupt and debased. For its energies are spawned by the raw power that spills from the rent in reality, at the top of the world in the forsaken wastes of the North.

Necromancy itself then is the distillation of the energies that are released upon the death of all living things. It combines the sorcerous power of the Dark with those same supernaturally generated energies. It is borne on the eldritch currents that blow across the world, in the wind that the pathetic spiritualist mediums of the Amethyst Order call Shyish and to which they give the symbol of the reaping scythe.

Therefore it is inextricably linked to the dead and where they can be found. Hence certain damned places become saturated with death energies: graveyards, charnel houses, the executioner’s scaffold, crossroad gibbets, even the barrows of the ancient tribes who once held dominion over the lands of what the upstart Karl-Franz now considers to be his Empire. At its most extreme, whole regions can soak up such concentrations of this malevolent paranormal power.

I speak of course of Mousillon in far Bretonnia, which is called Mousillon the Damned. I speak of the Blighted Marshes that lie north of the Tilean Sea in the shadow of the Irrana Mountains, of the desert kingdoms of the dead south of mystical Araby. And of course I speak of the tainted County of Sylvania, that accursed province of the leech-lords, where it is forever night and where none sleep easy in their beds when the wolves gather. In such places as these, where it is easier to summon the powers of death to do one’s bidding, an enchanter might more readily work his dire sorcery.

But of course death and the dead can be found everywhere, just as Morr holds the whole world in his cold grip and ultimately every living thing must submit to him. So the necromancer has dominion wherever he chooses.

Autumn arrived in an amber rush of turning foliage and falling leaves, the air damp and smoky, laden with the compost aroma of rot.

Erntezeit found the plague at its height in Bögenhafen. Festivals such as the infamous Pie Week of the Mootfolk, which the halfling community of the town would usually have celebrated with much merry-making and copious food consumption for a full eight days at the start of the month, passed without being marked. The town’s population had been ravaged by the remorseless plague, with fully half the population succumbing to its pox-ridden touch. This number included almost a third of the halfling community. The survivors of that hardy folk had already left the damned human town to return to the Moot many leagues away to the east and south.

The indiscriminate killer that was the black pox had cut down all manner of people, regardless of age, social class or gender. Young men in their prime were buried beside babes-in-arms, streetwalker girls beside merchant-lords. Councillors, scholars, tradesmen and rat-catchers; all had been taken by the hungry disease.

Men had deserted from the watch and were now surviving as desperate outlaws in the forests of the Reikwald. The Schaffenfest fairground had been abandoned long ago and was now littered with the scavenger-savaged corpses of livestock that had succumbed to the plague just as the citizens of the town had. Food waste rotted in the streets in festering piles, filling the air with noxious vapours. Bonfires were set in the streets to try and purify the air and mask the stench of death and decay that permeated everywhere. But the fires only served to make the river-mists even thicker, lending them a jaundiced tinge, as if the fog itself was tainted, its vaporous tendrils infecting the market town all over again.

Rats gathered, and some townsfolk, whose minds had run mad in the face of what they had seen happen to their neighbours, friends and loved ones, claimed to have seen rats as big as men scuttling through the empty, smog-shrouded streets, reemerging from the sewers at nightfall, walking on their, hind legs like men.

But such wild rumours and the desertion of the watch troubled not the two morbidly obsessed apprentices. In reality, the disaster that was steadily befalling the town was proving to be a blessing to Dieter and his accomplice Erich.

The black pox had made whole areas of the town veritable no-go areas, including the docks. No barges stopped in Bögenhafen anymore. The town lay under a pall of sickness and death. The boats which had been abandoned at their jetties had long ago become breeding grounds for rats, unloaded cargoes of foodstuffs rotting where they lay, fine bundles of cloth from Altdorf plundered by the vermin to line their nests.

With the docks and warehouses of the Ostendamm abandoned, Dieter and Erich were able to continue their clandestine work with even less fear of being troubled by the watch, or indeed anyone else in spite of the fact that a murder had been committed. There was no one there to discover it.

At first Dieter had panicked, expecting the watch to come looking for the missing Leopold, sent on the instructions of his masters at the physicians’ guild. However, he soon realised that during the current health crisis no one would come looking for him. Dieter doubted that he would even be missed. If any of those few remaining did question his whereabouts, they would doubtless assume that he too had become another statistic of the plague’s death toll.

The two apprentices themselves remained untouched by the plague; in fact they seemed untouchable. Dieter began to wonder if his gift protected him, and by extension Erich, from the disease.

In time the black pox would burn itself out, having burnt its way so fiercely and so quickly through the town. With the approach of winter it would slow and eventually die itself, black pox fever did not like the cold.

* * *

And so, on the night of the twenty-seventh of Erntezeit, Dieter was ready to begin the ceremony during which he would attempt to raise Leopold Hanser from the dead. It had taken them days—or rather nights—to prepare their fellow student’s body.

Leopold’s corpse had been laid out on the oak table. Its flesh had developed an unpleasant waxy texture and greeny-grey sheen, despite their best efforts to preserve it, so that they might finish preparing for the ritual. The angry red throttle-marks on Leopold’s swollen neck had darkened to purple. Unfortunately, gangrenous rot had begun to set in at the extremities. The body had been dressed again in a plain linen shift.

Candles had been placed on the tables and benches surrounding the central autopsy table, their inconstant, guttering light reflecting from the corpse’s waxy flesh like moonlight on oil. A lantern stood on the table next to Dieter, illuminating the pages of his open notebooks.

Dieter was sure that it had not been such a performance for Doktor Drakus to do the same, simply because he was so much more experienced and had gathered about him artefacts associated with death and the dark arts, such as the hand of glory and the homunculus.

In contrast, Dieter was trying to prepare the ritual based on a combination of what he had witnessed more than two months before, information he had culled from his dubiously procured books, what he had learnt from the physicians’ guild, what he had gleaned from all the years of watching his father about his work in the Chapel of Morr, and from what seemed to make sense, although he was sure he had not always possessed such wisdom. Perhaps the knowledge had been planted within him by the howling death-winds that had gusted through within Drakus’ basement vault.

Dieter had started his preparations by stripping the corpse and submerging it in a dyer’s wooden vat, filled with an alchemical solution, which had a coppery green tinge and an unpleasant acrid offal smell—but then Dieter had put a sheep’s intestines into the cauldron in which he had brewed the noxious liquid. The body had been steeped in the concoction for seven days. When Dieter and Erich had hauled it out again, Leopold’s skin had taken on a sagging leathery quality and rigour mortis had left it, making the joints supple again. Leopold’s face had gained a grotesque slack-jawed, open-eyed expression.

Some of the things that Leichemann’s Anatomy had said were needed at this stage neither Dieter nor Erich had been able to get hold of, such as a solution made from yew berries gathered at midnight when Morrslieb was full. But Dieter had decided that half of what Leichemann had recorded three centuries before was medical science way ahead of its time and the rest of it unsubstantiated folkloric nonsense with no real practical application. He could see how a solution of wolfsbane might help purge the body of toxins but he could not see how using a blade heated in a fire sprinkled with corpse dust and fuelled with coffin wood, and then cooled in the blood of virgins, could make any difference to the procedure he was developing. It was like trying to piece together a skeleton without knowing what one was supposed to look like.

After a full week’s work the body was ready. The temple bells had already chimed eleven by the time Dieter was ready to begin the ritual itself.

Erich was standing in the same position as they had seen Drakus’ manservant stand, at the head of the table. He was nervously picking at his nails, his silent lips working as he went over and over in his mind the words he would have to say as part of the ritual. Dieter stood at the side of the table, his eyes cast down, breathing deeply as he tried to calm his excitedly racing heart and focus his mind.

“Let us begin,” he breathed.

Dieter stretched his hands out over the body, palms down, trembling. It was not Leopold Hanser, he told himself, not anymore. With the vital spark of life gone, the carcass was nothing but an empty husk, a hollow man. He saw the words he had to speak form in letters of fire in his mind and began to chant. Erich’s wavering voice joined his and his accomplice began to recite the words, the pronunciation of which Dieter had spent long hours teaching him.

The two students did not know what the words meant but there was no denying their power. The darkness of the warehouse congealed. The air they breathed became thick, like the cloying river mists smothering the streets of the half-dead town, oozing into their lungs like slime. The alchemical stink of the preserved corpse became accented with the loamy smell of vegetable decay, the iron reek of spilled blood and the bittersweet perfume of fleshy putrefaction.

The hard consonants of the words produced a guttural alien sound that conjured up images of a distant, almost unreal land, where death had held sway for interminable eons. And although he might not know the meaning of the words, Dieter fully understood their intent. Images swirled and solidified briefly in the utter blackness filling his mind, only to dissolve again and change into something else.

Leering lichen-coated skulls. Bloated maggots grown fat in the eye-sockets of a dead horse. Blood running from the corner of a cold smiling mouth. Anselm Fleischer burning at the stake, shouting blasphemous obscenities. A hunchbacked abomination chewing on a human leg bone whilst perched atop a gravestone. Drowned faces puffed with stagnant water, with pondweed tresses and eyes plucked out by scavenging fish. Smashing a stone down again and again into the pulped mess of a man’s skull. Flayed human skin. Fingernails clogged with splinters and grave-dirt.

A nauseous ache knotted his guts and he felt his gorge rise. He swallowed hard and focused all the more intently on the mantra he was reciting over and over again.

Thunder rolled overhead like a tattoo drummed by skeletal musicians on skull-pans with human thighbones. The flickering candle-flames guttered, but did not go out.

Dieter’s head throbbed with the build-up of power behind his eyes. A sibilant murmur whispered through the warehouse as if other, unearthly voices were joining in the frenetic mantra-chant, calling on powers unknown and terrible to reverse nature and return Leopold Hanser to life.

The images continued to assail him. The dull gleam of a sweeping scythe. Wild dogs worrying at the carcass of a beggar. Butcher hooks hung with disembowelled cadavers. The glassy, slack-jawed stare of a rotting head on an iron spike. Grinding down bones in a pestle and mortar. His hands tight around his friend’s broken neck. The spill of purple-grey intestines as a hanged thief was drawn and quartered. The desiccated husk of a long-dead knight lying within its cold, stone tomb, still clutching his sword in rigour-locked fingers. Bodies struggling as they slipped down the greased stakes that punctured their midriffs. The last grains of sand running out of the bulb of an hourglass.

His breathing was hard and ragged now. It clouded as mist in front of him. He had not realised how cold it had become inside the warehouse.

Dieter reached out his hands to the darkness and the shadows swarmed towards him as he channelled the dark energy, howling through the warehouse, through his own nerve-jangling body and into the motionless corpse on the table in front of him.

Frost crackled on a glass alembic and a marble dissection slab. Erich was shivering but through chattering teeth continued to chant, unable to stop, as if hypnotised. The solidifying darkness pressed in around them.

The body twitched, an arm slipping from the table to dangle at its side. Dieter felt it brush against him rather than saw it move. A buzz of excitement leapt within him but he consciously maintained his concentration. And he had to concentrate even harder, for with the churning pressure building behind his eyes, Dieter felt pain flare along every nerve in his body. It was as if he was caught in the midst of a charged electrical storm. He could feel every hair on his body stand on end. He tried to keep chanting through gritted teeth, fighting back the searing physical pain he was feeling.

The body before him suddenly arched its back and then flopped down again. His searching eyes fell on Erich. His accomplice was rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth as he continued to chant. Then his eyes were back on Leopold Hanser’s corpse.

A strangely luminescent mist was coalescing out of the air above the table and rushing into the corpse’s mouth and nostrils, blown by the unnatural gale rising inside the warehouse, carrying with it slivers of congealed darkness. The ribcage rose as though its lungs were inflating.

The pain was now unbearable and yet he was so close to success. He was sure of it.

Dieter let out the agony in one almighty cry as he screamed the words of the invocation, the splintering pain in his head feeling as if it would split his skull open.

Thunder crashed and the storm broke directly overhead. Every light in the warehouse blew out, other than the lantern, and Dieter blacked out.

He had only been unconscious for a second but, when he came to again, Dieter found himself lying on the floor in a pool of his own vomit with Erich anxiously trying to rouse him.

“What happened? What happened?” he was shrieking.

With Erich’s help, Dieter sat up, resting his back against a leg of the oak table, his knees drawn up, his head lolling forwards. The front of his black robe was spattered with yellow bile. Its acrid smell stung his nostrils; its bitter taste burnt his throat. His head was pounding. He closed his eyes tight against the throbbing ache as if that would somehow drive it away. When it did not, he opened his eyes again.

The warehouse was dark, the feeble light from the lantern doing little to penetrate the black murk that had slithered into the building. But the darkness did not seem so all-consuming anymore. The innocuous shapes of the warehouse resolved themselves again out of the gloom. The dark power Dieter had summoned was slowly dissipating.

Next to him the corpse’s arm hung limply over the edge of the table, unmoving. The ritual had failed.

Exhaustion washed through Dieter so sudden and so strong that he would have collapsed again if not for the way he was sitting.

It was only then that he realised he had expended a massive amount of energy in conjuring up the power of death and attempting the ritual. He felt weak, drained. His muscles trembled with palsied fatigue. He was bitterly cold and yet icy sweat still prickled his brow. His lank, black hair was wet with it.

He had expended all his energy to achieve as much as he had, and yet still it hadn’t been enough. Had he done something wrong? Had he misremembered the words or hand gestures? Was the whole rite missing some vital ingredient? Had he not prepared the body thoroughly enough? Had it failed because of something Erich had done?

It had been so easy with the cat, painfully easy by comparison, but then it was a smaller, simpler creature and had been fresher. But Dieter sensed that it was more than just that. His mind came round to the idea again that perhaps it was something about the night on which he resurrected Erich’s pet. Perhaps it had been the night of Geheimnisnacht itself that had helped him accomplish it? Strange things happened on Geheimnisnacht certainly. Supernatural things.

Slowly and with the finality of a death-knell, the fog-muffled temple bells began to mark the hour of twelve. Midnight. The witching hour.

Dieter lifted his head. The nervous high he had felt during the ritual was now replaced by another surge of exhaustion and negative feeling. Or was it simply clarity, as cold realisation soaked into him.

What had he been trying to do? To raise a corpse from the dead was blasphemy. Thank Morr and Shallya that he had failed. Frogs and rats were one thing, but to raise a human being to unlife was the vilest heresy, an act befitting the servants of evil and not a scholar of physic. And it hadn’t just been any corpse; it had been that of his friend and fellow scholar, Leopold Hanser. A man whose good deeds and generous heart would be missed. Dieter was suddenly wracked with gut wrenching, overwhelming feelings of guilt.

“What happened?” Erich was at him again. “We were so close! Why did you stop?”

Dieter sat on the dirt floor of the warehouse in shocked silence. He didn’t know what had come over him. He had been a man obsessed. Almost a man possessed, so driven had he been to succeed in his dark endeavour. What would his father have thought? If he had been alive he would have disowned his prodigal son and damned his immortal soul. As it was he was probably turning in his grave even now. And what would his darling sister think of him? The thought of her distraught horrified features was almost enough to cause him to break down in tears where he sat.

But as it was, the blasphemous invocation had failed and he had been saved. In all the time that he had been wondering if he could master his powers he had not once considered whether he should. And how could he have been so deluded as to believe the powers that had been awoken within him, having lain dormant for so long, were a gift? They were a curse: a filthy stain on his immortal soul, and one that it would take years of penance and contrition to remove. But if that was what it would take, that was what Dieter would do.

The bells finishing striking midnight. The heavens grumbled as the rain drummed down against the roof of the warehouse, finding its way inside in places and descending in a steady splattering dribble.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Dieter admitted testily. “But whatever it was, the gods be praised.”

“W-What? What are you saying?”

Dieter turned his weary head and fixed Erich with steely eyes. “I am saying that someone, some higher power, was merciful and stopped us before we damned our immortal souls forever and went the way of Anselm Fleischer.”

“You can’t m-mean that!”

“I can. And I do.”

“B-But we’ve worked for months for this. You have been given a gift. Think of all those you could save if you completed your work!”

“Think of all those others who would die you mean. Think of Leopold Hanser. Think of Anselm Fleischer. Think of us. Think of yourself.”

“Y-You’ve gone mad!” Erich shrieked, leaping to his feet. “Leopold H-Hanser died that we might further our cause.”

The furious apprentice necromancer kicked the table leg in frustration, jerking the body laid upon it.

“He d-didn’t understand the import of what we were doing here!”

The gangrenous arm swung like a leaden pendulum, morbidly marking each passing second as they steadily and inevitably approached the moment of their deaths.

“He would have b-betrayed us! But now he can help us f-finish our work.”

With a great exhalation of foetid gas the corpse sat up sharply.

Erich shrieked and stumbled backwards into a trestle table, hard enough to send phials and alembics crashing to the floor. In startled horror Dieter scrambled away from the table.

Leopold Hanser’s corpse turned its head to look at him, the crushed vertebrae of its neck grating as it did so, a sound like broken nails scratched across a slate. Its mouth gaped open and the corpse made a noise that sounded as if it was taking in a great, ragged breath. A phlegmy gargling began in the back of its crushed throat.

The detached, scholarly part of Dieter’s jittery mind wondered why something that was dead would need to breathe. Morr alone knew what state Leopold’s lungs were in. Half full of preserving fluid probably and about as much use as if Leopold had drowned to death, rather than been strangled.

Was it force of habit, the vestige of an ingrained response in the body, even though Leopold’s mind was gone and it could only be reacting on primitive instinct and nothing more?

Dieter had succeeded after all. But that knowledge did not make him feel any better. In fact it only served to make him feel sickeningly worse. It was too late. He was truly damned.

In the faltering light of the lantern the zombie’s sour mouldering flesh glistened wetly. Leopold’s blond hair had been stained green by the preserving bath and hung lank about his pallid shoulders.

It reached clumsily for Dieter with flailing arms. It jerked again and its legs kicked against the table, fists and heels hammering against the oak table. Dieter had not thought to keep the corpse secured to the table.

The zombie let out a ghastly moan—a spine-chilling cry that sounded as if the dead thing remembered being alive and was reliving the agony of its death all over again—and half-fell off the table. Swaying, it got unsteadily to its feet. It turned towards Dieter again, mewling pitifully, focusing on the one who had caused it to be born again, raised from the dead to shambling unlife.

The corpse’s thrashing convulsions had ruptured its skin at the joints of its elbows and knees. The flesh underneath was darkly discoloured. Despite the gloom Dieter could see that a darkening stain was spreading across the front of the linen shift as well.

Dieter dragged himself back further, banging into the side of another workbench. Something shaken from the work surface above clattered onto the floor next to him. It was a rusted bone-saw. He snatched it up, holding it out in front of him as he might brandish a sword.

The resurrected corpse bearing down on him with filthy talons outstretched might look like his erstwhile friend Leopold Hanser—the only person to have shown him true friendship when he arrived in Bögenhafen—but now it was a mindless monster that was little more than a rabid beast, driven by some insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.

The zombie took its first few faltering steps towards its saviour, its feet turned unnaturally inwards, its gait shambling as if it was remembering how to walk. All the time it wore Leopold’s dead face like a mask, staring through it at Dieter’s tarnished heart and tainted soul.

Dieter was trapped, the bench behind him, the undead creature in front of him. He still felt weak although the horror of the situation he now found himself in lent him some strength. He managed to struggle to his feet before the zombie could reach him.

He lashed out wildly at the stumbling corpse. The bone-saw snagged the cloth of Leopold’s shift and ripped the material open, cutting into the flesh underneath as well. Black, congealed blood oozed from the ragged hole in the corpse’s side. The neurotic Dieter fancied that he could see a nub of yellow bone and a rot-disfigured organ through the gash.

The creature continued to let out its heart-rending howl but did not particularly react to the messy wound Dieter had dealt it. Still it came on. It was almost on top of him now. He struck again. This time the saw dug into the meat of Leopold’s bruise-blackened neck. The rusty instrument struck bone with a clunk and snagged in the wound. Dieter released his grip, leaving half the saw’s blade and its handle protruding from the corpse.

Dieter felt freezing fingers lock around his wrist in a steely grip and cried out in pain and terror. Then somehow he found the courage and to break free, his horrified fear lending him the strength he needed. He slammed two bunched fists into Leopold’s chest and felt, as well as heard, a rib snap. The zombie staggered backwards and Dieter ran to the sackcloth curtain.

The zombie swung round and its dead eyes fixed on Dieter’s accomplice. Erich was hunched in a foetal ball next to the trestle table, whimpering in the dark. He seemed to be paralysed by fear in the face of the horrific appearance and unnatural movements of the thing that had once been Leopold Hanser, rather than elated at Dieter’s success.

Dieter was so terrified himself that he was frozen into inaction again. Part of him felt obligated to help his friend and yet he feared what might happen to him should Leopold’s zombie actually manage to get its gangrenous hands on him a second time.

The thing that had been Leopold lurched towards Erich. Its jaws opened even wider and a baleful intent flared in its eyes, like some feral predator with an insatiable hunger for raw meat.

And then the stiletto dagger was in Erich’s hand again. Dieter had not seen him with it since the night of the second break-in they had committed. Erich slashed and stabbed, getting to his feet and spinning his gangling form lithely out of the way of the creature’s grabbing arms. The blade opened dark wounds on the zombie’s torso and carved up the meat of its forearms.

Erich ducked the clutching hands one more time and twisted free, able to get himself clear at last. As he barged past the poor undead imitation of Leopold Hanser his hip bashed against the table bearing Dieter’s notebooks and the lantern. The jolted lamp fell over, spilling the last of its oil across the table and the covering of papers. Then it rolled off the edge of the table and smashed on the floor, where the hem of the sackcloth curtain trailed in the dirt of the floor.

The pages of Dieter’s precious notebooks first browned then blackened as they charred and caught light. Tongues of fire licked up the rough hemp fabric of the draped curtains, the hungry flames racing up towards the rafters of the hayloft above.

For a split second Dieter went to rescue his notebooks and then stopped himself, suddenly realising what he was doing and coming to his senses. He would not be needing them again after this night.

Apparently disorientated, the zombie stumbled around the oak table, which was also starting to burn. In no time at all it was surrounded by a snarling wall of flame as the fire ate up the fabric of the curtain and the rest of the fuel Dieter and Erich had unwittingly gathered in the warehouse.

Alembics cracked and exploded as the heat of the blaze rapidly increased.

Dieter and Erich looked at each other without saying a word, the fire reflected back at them in the dark mirrors of each other’s eyes. Then they turned and bolted for the door.

In a mere moment they were out in the rain and cold of the Erntezeit night and Dieter was locking the door behind them. He could still hear the zombie’s bestial howling as it plunged about inside the burning building.

Erich led them away from the dockside, down a cobbled path that ran alongside the watercourse of the Hafenback, back towards the town’s water gate. In the shelter of another looming storehouse they stopped and looked back to watch the destruction of the warehouse.

The crackle of the flames could be heard even from here, their russet glow beginning to light the other buildings around the warehouse as roiling flames broke free of the inferno now raging within. The cleansing flames were rapidly and effectively destroying all the evidence of Dieter’s and Erich’s crimes. Soon the only proof of what they had been up to for the last two months would be the burnt out shell of the fire-ravaged warehouse itself.

Flames swirled into the night sky. Beyond the spark-filled billows of tarry smoke, Dieter caught a glimpse of the buildings on the other side of the river. Almost no lights twinkled on the far bank amidst the squalor of the Westendamm slums. Only the highest, arrow-slit windows of the Fort Blackfire barracks, close against the northern battlements of the town wall, showed any signs of life. And those guard barracks were only manned by a skeleton staff now.

Dieter wondered if the few guardsmen left on watch there could see the fire raging in the docks through the rain. If the conflagration spread to the surrounding buildings they certainly would. But the sudden autumnal downpour, soaking him to the bone even now, might save them and finish the job of purification for them yet.

Heavy rain poured down, sluicing the streets clean of the accumulated detritus, streams of mud and filth washing down into the Bögen. The downpour hissed as it fell on the burning warehouse but already Dieter could see that it was dampening down the crackling flames.

Dieter stared transfixed, mesmerised by the fire, despite Erich tugging at his sleeve, eager to be away. His heart was racing and he was out of breath again. He felt as if he could sleep for a week, only he knew that he would be plagued by fitful dreams, haunted by the image of Leopold’s slack-jawed dead-eyed face.

“We were so busy wondering if we could we didn’t ever stop and consider if we should,” Dieter muttered to himself, half under his breath. “I never stopped to really consider the consequences of what I was doing.”

The warehouse continued to burn.

And the unrelenting rain continued to fall.

BRAUZEIT

Until Death

What is death? What does it mean to die? Where does that immortal part of us go when we die? Or is this frail world of shadows all there is?

As a priest of Morr yourself, Father, I need not tell you that Morr is the most austere, exacting and unforgiving of deities. He offers little in terms of blessings and boons to the everyman about his daily business and yet all come before him in the end.

All dead souls belong to him and he hoards them greedily—I should know. And he is a cruel tormentor of a god. You think that I speak heresy? Maybe I do but I also know that it is the truth. He sends dreams to confuse and confound and nightmares that wake a man screaming in the dark watches of the night. He is the master of illusions, so much so that he has succeeded in fooling an entire civilisation into believing that death is not the end.

Well I have seen into the other world, into the freezing abyss of what some fools call the afterlife.

I’ll tell you what death is. Death is the ultimate thief. It is stronger than love and longer lasting than time.

You might wonder how one such as I can talk of love, how I can consider myself capable of love. Yet I have loved and known I love. In all my long life there has been no stronger feeling than that which I had for my dear, darling sister Katarina. I would have given my life for hers: would that I could have done. It was because of her that I turned my back on the dark sorcery I had taken to my heart.

And she almost saved me from the fate that ultimately befell me, which nonetheless has brought me to this confession now as I stare death in the face at last.

I tell you, true death is not just the end of life, it is the end of everything; I should know as I now stare into the hungry void.

Nothing awaits us beyond the threshold to Morr’s dark realm other than an eternity of endless oblivion.

Dieter spent the last days of Erntezeit living in a state of permanent anxiety, much as he had done in the days following his theft from Doktor Drakus’ house all those j months before. Neither he nor Erich dared venture out from their lodgings for fear of whom they might run in to.

But they felt as safe in Frau Keeler’s lodging house as they would anywhere. They were the only ones still residing in the tenement now. Frau Keeler had gone to stay with her sister in Ubersreik, saying that if they were foolish enough to want to stay then they were welcome to it. Herr Liebervitz, the weirdroot-addicted actor and playwright who rented the apartment on the first floor, had also escaped Bögenhafen before the plague reached its height. And no one had seen the lustful merchant prince or his paramour in months.

Dieter existed at this time balanced on the blade-thin line between sanity and insanity. He was teetering on the brink after all that had been revealed to him in recent months, after all that he had done. At any moment he could have gone over and become like Anselm Fleischer, his reason never to return.

He would wake from half-remembered, death-haunted dreams, in the darkest watches of the night, thinking that he could hear a hammering at the door. More often than not it would turn out to be his dormer window come loose of its latch and banging in the wind. He would eventually get back to sleep but it would be unsettled and uncomfortable. He would wake the next day feeling even more fatigued than he had before he had retired to bed the previous night. At any moment he expected the watch, or worse still Brother-Captain Krieger and his witch hunters, to turn up at his door. Or even Leopold’s scorched and shambling corpse.

He found himself spending longs hours wondering what had happened to the revenant Leopold. He was still half-expecting to hear that the zombie had escaped the burning warehouse and been on a murderous rampage through the town.

What was it that Dieter had unleashed that could reanimate a rotting corpse? And why had it not died the moment his splitting headache caused Dieter to break concentration? It had not behaved as the cat had, that much was certain. It had possessed a malevolent cannibal instinct of its own.

Had the corpse been possessed by a daemon; was that how necromancy worked? Had it been reanimated by another undead spirit? Was it Leopold’s own spirit that had returned to the dead shell of his body? Or was it that of a more powerful malevolent entity, a restless soul that had been trapped on the earthly plane, perhaps because of some crime it had committed whilst it was among the living? And if it was Leopold’s soul what insane torment must it have been suffering to make the zombie behave in such a rabid way?

Was it the Dark Magic he had poured into the cadaver that kept it so horrifically alive? Or had it simply been Dieter’s own subconscious will that had driven the walking corpse? But then if that was the case, again he had to ask, why had it kept going after Dieter’s blackout? And what had happened to it? Had the zombie really perished in the fire, as Dieter sincerely hoped? Could something that had been dead once already really be done away with again that easily? Certainly wounds that both Dieter and Erich had dealt it had done nothing to stop it. It had carried on as if it hadn’t even felt anything.

Would something so simple as a fire really be able to stop something that had already been brought back from the dead once? The zombie had still been moaning its pitiful cry when Dieter had locked the warehouse door behind him. Surely only the intense heat found at the heart of a furnace would be furious enough to destroy it. As the son of a priest of Morr, Dieter knew that it took a great deal of heat to reduce a body to ash.

Holy scriptures always taught that fire could cleanse a place of evil. But rather contradictorily, he had always thought, images of Morr’s kingdom sometimes showed the realm of the damned consumed by fire. So which was it? Was fire a servant of good or evil? Or was it simply like death, the great leveller? It had no master, took no sides, and treated all alike.

And such thoughts did not cease when Dieter slept either. His dreams were filled with images of shambling corpses, expelled from the foetid soil of their graves. Every night the nightmarish host grew in number but always it was led by the fire-burnt corpse of Leopold Hanser. He was now almost unrecognisable as the beneficent, blond-haired would-be physician. Each night the decomposing state of his body worsened so that Dieter could see exposed pulsating organs between charred ribs and loops of entrails uncoiling from the rent in his midriff.

It got to the point where Dieter was almost afraid to sleep. He wasn’t sleeping for as long as he had used to and what little sleep he did manage did not refresh him as it was broken by the horrific dreams and moments of sudden, fretting wakefulness.

Brauzeit arrived after the equinox of Mittherbst, grey and grim, in a bluster of autumnal gales. Howling squalls tore the colour-changed leaves from the trees, sent slates flying from rooftops, and drenched the town on an almost daily basis with rain.

In the surrounding villages people should have been brewing cider and beer, were it not for the fact that the farming hamlets were all but deserted by the living. The wind fallen apples had been left to rot in the yellowing grass of the cider orchards, and the hops festered blackly on the stalk in the unharvested fields.

The days were shortening as the year began to fade and run into the dark, dead months of winter. Dusk came earlier each day and the sun ever more reluctant to rise the next morning over the plague-ravaged market town.

But Dieter was just as desperate to find out what had happened in the wake of the fire at the warehouse. And it was this ravenous desire that eventually drove him to venture out once again, into the world, in search of information. He had to find out more.

Donning his cloak, he set out surreptitiously into the foggy streets travelling further than the vitaller’s in Eisen Bahn on this occasion. The Brauzeit mists muffled his footsteps against the cobbles, turning the facades of the vacant cross-daubed buildings into ghosts of their former selves.

He stopped in at the Cutpurse’s Hands which he had long ago learnt was a hotbed for all the gossip circulating the town. The salubrious tavern was still open for business and appeared to be doing a good trade as well. But then most of its clientele looked half-dead already, or like the sort of characters who would do a deal with anyone, including a daemon, if it got them what they wanted, even protecting them from all a pox-plague might have to offer. It was probably all the weirdroot that was smoked there and the quantities of alcohol that were consumed that had had something to do with the continued survival of the drinking den’s clientele.

It was not somewhere he had ever dared go without Erich before. But all that had changed now. Sitting quietly in a corner stall, in the fog of stale smoke and with a flagon of ale in front of him, Dieter listened. Some people had heard that there had been a fire on the Ostendamm but it did not sound like it had spread to any of the other run-down buildings in that part of the town. None present in the Cutpurse’s Hands knew what had started it. This didn’t stop them from speculating, however.

Their suggestions ranged from the mundane, such as that the cause of the fire had been a lightning strike on the warehouse during the storm, to the wildly fanciful, that the building was being used by a profane cult who were trying to summon their daemonic patron to save them from the plague and instead incurred the blasphemous entity’s wrath which punished them with fire.

But none of their wild speculations were as bizarre or as accurate as the terrifying truth that Dieter was now finding hard to comprehend had really happened.

And, as was to be expected, there was more talk of the plague. Some said that it had been spread by invisible daemons present in the air all around them. Others said it was down to restless undead spirits who had died without receiving a holy blessing. Some even put forward the ludicrous idea that rat fleas spread it. Certain doom-mongers still declared that it was a judgement upon the town just as Sigmar’s Hammer had been for Mordheim three hundred years earlier.

The general consensus was that the black pox was itself now dying as the year began to turn, the sickness having thrived in the foetid heat of summer was unable to survive in the cold of approaching winter. Others of a more religious persuasion were of course saying that the evildoers had been punished and Sigmar was showing His mercy. There was even talk of some of the town’s inhabitants returning to Bögenhafen before the year’s end.

By the time he eventually finished his drink, Dieter decided he had heard enough and, daring not to stay any longer, returned to his home, such as it was.

That night he dreamt of home, but it was changed beyond recognition.

Beneath a lacerated sky bleeding wisps of cirrus cloud stained crimson by the setting sun, lay the ruined village of Hangenholz. Dieter stood in the shadow of the Highwayman’s Oak, Old Jack’s gibbet cage creaking above him in the bitter breeze, looking across a scene of utter devastation.

The fields of barley had been reduced to smoking stubble. The trees beyond the village were denuded as if the grip of winter were on the land, their branches twisted like claws. The thatched roofs of people’s homes were grey and sagging with rot. Smoke also rose from the fire-cracked stone walls of the watermill, its huge wheel seized and broken.

The bridge still stood, as did the sundered tower of Raven’s Crag, which watched over the village darkly. The steeple of the Chapel of Morr was also intact, visible above the gables of the decaying village. The funereal bell tolled mournfully with slow death-knells, a dead sound carried on the keening wind that blew the smoke in drifts across the burned fields.

Dieter veered off the stony trackway that curved round to the east into Hangenholz, moving as if drifting over the stubble-burnt fields himself. The scarecrow was still there, only now it was Leopold’s crucified corpse. As he neared it, his murdered friend’s eyes snapped open and the zombie lashed out at him with the bloody gnawed stumps of its fingers, its greening face twisted in a hissing bestial snarl.

Then he was past the feral, undead thing and floating across the footbridge over the millstream. He crossed the village square between the lengthening shadows, where a cremated thing fused to the charcoal stump of a stake chattered and prattled blasphemous obscenities to itself, and approached the door of the priest’s house; his former home.

He glided through the open door and up the stairs. Another door creaked open ahead of him. He could see the bottom of a bed beyond the door. Someone was lying there, the outline of legs visible under the taut sheet, an emaciated arm resting on top of it. He got the impression that there was someone—or something—else waiting for him behind the door. Dieter slowly entered the room and saw who lay in the bed…

Dieter woke with a start and sat bolt upright in his bed, cold sweat beading his forehead.

Of all the horrors that he had seen since arriving in Bögenhafen the image of the body lying in the bed had been the worst by far, even though it had not been the most bloodthirsty or gruesome. He tried to cast the image of the death-bed from his mind, praying to Morr that it had not been a prophetic vision of the future sent by the deity of dreams to torment him for having turned his back on his god.

But Morr did not send his dreams without reason. Dieter’s dream of Hangenholz told him that there was still something wrong with the world, something unnatural that had no right being there. Something that sickened nature and had to be destroyed.

Or was it something that was still fundamentally wrong with Dieter? He certainly suspected that it was something of his making, something that he was now inextricably linked with.

It was no good, just because no one else had encountered Leopold’s zombie—at least no one that had lived to tell the tale—Dieter had to know for himself what had become of the walking corpse. He had no choice but to return to the scene of his most blasphemous and despicable crime.

He went back the next day on Bezahltag the seventh of Brauzeit, with the autumnal sun a pale disc in the cold white sky. He chose the middle of the day, when the sun was as high in the firmament as it would ever be at this time of the year.

Secreted beneath his black cloak was Erich’s dagger, just in case. He had not told his roommate where he was going; it would only have caused the unstable Erich to behave even more strangely than was now the norm.

They had not exchanged many words since the night of the fire. Dieter had been unsettled to discover that Erich had begun to imitate Dieter in that he had started dissecting vermin. He had also developed a heavy head cold. At least Dieter kept telling himself that it was only a cold. Following the events of the twenty-seventh of Erntezeit, Dieter would have been half-afraid that Erich himself might report them both to the witch hunters, had it not been for the older youth’s healthy distrust of authority, which had not left him.

Through force of habit now, more than anything else, Dieter took a convoluted route through the town, avoiding the main thoroughfares of the Hafenstrasse and Bergstrasse where possible, even though the streets of Bögenhafen were still deathly quiet.

He approached the rain-slicked ruins of the warehouse along the bank of the Hafenback. There was a hole between the other buildings of the Ostendamm where the warehouse should have been. No one was around and a light, yet insistent, drizzle had begun to fall. Dieter pulled his cloak tighter about him, picking his way through the tangle of fire-broken beams and boards, ever on the lookout for a grasping, blistered hand or the sudden appearance of a howling rot-ruined face. The walls of the warehouse still stood to a height of two spans but the whole of the hayloft and the roof had been brought down by the raging conflagration that had consumed the building before the torrential rain put it out.

Much of Dieter’s makeshift laboratory had been buried. It would be impossible for him to shift the wreckage to see if Leopold’s body was underneath, but he was reassured to think that it would have been almost impossible for the zombie to have escaped from the burning building before perishing in the flames. There was no evidence left of his crime, he was pleased to admit at last. Then he felt guilty for feeling relief in the face of the murder of his friend. Perhaps part of him wanted to be found out and made to pay for what he had done.

There was no going back to his misguided ways, Dieter knew, he had already made that decision and besides, his books were burnt. But that did not stop him feeling a pang of sorrow for all that had been lost on the night of the fire, his innocence included.

Lying half in a puddle of ash-black water was a sodden leather-bound notebook. Dieter bent down to pick it up and abruptly caught a glimpse of his reflection in the rain-speckled surface of the puddle. His breath caught in his throat and he gasped. The face looking back at him contorted into a gargoyle grimace. Was this what he had become?

His black hair was long and lank, framing a pallid face in which the bone structure could be clearly seen, the flesh gaunt and drawn. His eyes were sunken in dark-ringed hollows but their gaze was as penetrating as ever, as if they could look right through a man into his very soul.

But something inside Dieter made him pick up the book in his gloved hands; perhaps that part of him that would always be the Dieter Heydrich who had murdered his friend only to bring him back from the dead. He opened the book, carefully turning the sodden pages, unable to tear his eyes from the illustrations and diagrams he saw sketched there, their inky outlines smudged and blurred.

For a moment, frozen images of that fateful night, when he’d gone too far into the dark, flashed through his mind. He felt a tingle of power again at the memory but at the same time the bitter taste of bile rose again in the back of his throat as he saw what he had drawn in such macabre, surgically precise detail.

With a thought he suppressed the dark power crackling within him. He had put his dark obsession, those black and deep desires, behind him now.

When he returned to Dunst Strasse Dieter was surprised to see a ragged wretch of a boy, his pallid purple skin blotched with red rosettes of sores, standing at the door to the lodging house, a letter in his hand. Dieter took the letter from the boy with his own gloved hands. He had taken to wearing gloves to guard against contamination, just in case.

He immediately knew something was wrong when he saw that his name and address were not written in his sister’s hand but one much less used to writing. He did not wait to read the letter in the privacy of his own chamber but tore it open at once.

It was brief and to the point, and its few words chilled Dieter to the bone.

Herr Heydrich

Your sister Katarina is sick. Come at once.

Yours in the faith of Morr,

Josef Wohlreich

Under a sky the colour of wet slate, Dieter paused beneath the Highwayman’s Oak and looked across the fallow fields towards the village of Hangenholz. After five frustrating days of travel, there being little coach traffic on the roads in time of plague, he was home once more. Massing thunderheads chased scudding billows of cloud across the sky, like wolves running down sheep.

Hangenholz still looked just as it always had. Old Jack’s gibbet cage creaked in the branches of the Highwayman’s Oak above him in the bitter breeze. The woods that gave the dour village its name were dappled gold and ruddy bronze, the charcoal marks of branches black against the parchment of the sky.

Beyond the trees, the ruined tower atop the Raven’s Crag escarpment continued its silent vigil of the village, but it seemed to Dieter that it had been most negligent in that duty. Ragged-winged birds circled the hill to which they had given their name, their croaking caws barely audible on the breeze.

Turning off the road again to cross the denuded fields, Dieter heard a dolorous sound that froze the blood in his veins. The lonely tolling of the chapel bell drifted to him across the bleak landscape. It could mean only one thing. The bell was rung when someone had died, marking their passing from the mortal world to Morr’s twilight domain.

Dieter ran. He passed the scarecrow, barely noticing that it was a turnip-headed imitation of a man again, and bounded over the footbridge across the millstream into the village.

The black pox had come to Hangenholz.

As he ran, Dieter was dimly aware of red crosses painted on the doors of other houses, as well as the smoky pyres burning in the streets where the infected dead had been cremated on the order of Notary Krupster, seeing as how Hangenholz was now without a priest of Morr to bless the bodies.

Dieter saw Josef Wohlreich standing in the porch of the chapel, a cloth tied over his mouth, ringing the bell, and saw the tears streaming down his face as he turned, hearing Dieter’s pounding steps. Ignoring the fresh cross daubed on the door of his own home, and the risk of infection, Dieter burst into the priest’s house, running up the stairs to his sister’s room three at a time.

At the threshold of her room he paused for a moment that seemed to stretch out into an eternity of heart-rending agony, seeing Katarina lying there on her bed under the thin sheet already covering her like a shroud. Her skin was the colour of purest driven snow, her hollow-eyed countenance almost peaceful. He would never gaze into her limpid brown eyes again.

Wailing, Dieter threw himself on his knees at her bedside and gathered her up in his arms, hugging her cold, slight form to him, sobbing into the emaciated hollow of her neck.

Then he lay down on the cold sheets next to her, brushing the hair out of her eyes and telling her that he would always take care of her.

And that was how Josef Wohlreich found him an hour later.

“She passed away this morning,” he said flatly.

“Was she alone?” Dieter asked.

“No, I was with her.”

“Then thank you for that,” Dieter said. “I could not have bared it if she had gone on into Morr’s kingdom without someone who loved her at her side.”

His tears were spent for now. He might be a doktor in the making but there was no remedy that he could prescribe for his grief.

He did for her what he could; what he had done for their father. He washed Katarina’s body with herbs and, after anointing it with holy oils, dressed her in a plain cotton nightdress for a shroud. And he blessed her, although he was unsure whether his blessings meant anything anymore.

As he kept his lonely vigil in the Chapel of Morr, with Katarina’s body lying on the bier before the pillared gateway of the holy shrine, a garland of white frostflowers in her hair, Dieter was at war with his emotions and with his god.

When he looked upon Morr’s gateway in the chapel he felt nothing but bitterness in his heart. There was a hole in his being where Morr had once dwelt. At that moment he hated the god of death and dreams; he had taken all of Dieter’s family from him, despite his father’s loyal service. What had they done to deserve this? He knew what he was thinking was heresy but he cared not.

He was wracked with grief and guilt. He had been too late to save his devoted sister. He had been too late to even say goodbye. He remembered her as he had last seen her, months ago at the end of Pflugzeit. He suddenly remembered that her seventeenth birthday had been only two days away.

The one person in the whole world who had really known what it had been like for him growing up in Hangenholz—the ostracised child of the priest of Morr—because she had gone through it too, was gone. She had been the only one who had shown him any love since his mother died when he was only five years old. And, had he but known it, she had been the one who had kept his darker, more morbid tendencies in check.

Had he brought this fate upon his sister, by replying to her letter? Had the messenger who had carried his missive to Hangenholz already been infected with the merciless disease? Was that what had happened? Why had this insane disease taken her and not him, he who was so much more deserving of its dark ministrations?

He had been unable to save his father because he lacked the appropriate skills, he was convinced of it. But there was a way he could make amends for bringing about his sister’s demise. He had the skills that could bring her back! Even if his powers were born of darkness, how could they produce something evil if they were put to the service of good, brought to bear with only the best of intentions and honest love in his heart?

He would not let the cremation pyres have her, nor the cold, unwelcoming earth of Morr’s field. He would resurrect her.

Beyond the corrupted signifiers of the plague, there was hardly a mark on her. She had only died that morning, and she had died of natural causes rather than in violent circumstances. She would return with her wits intact, free of the madness of the undead Leopold Hanser had suffered, he was sure of it. Leopold’s body had been spoiled by days of decomposition. Katarina’s was not. She would be whole again.

At the final chime of midnight, Dieter carried his sister out of the chapel and back into her own home. She was no burden: it was as if she weighed nothing at all.

Laying her peaceful corpse out on the table in the dining room of the house, Dieter stoked up the fire and began his preparations. Two guttering candles had been lit in sconces around the room and Dieter had inscribed dark sigils that seem to squirm before the eye in the polished surface of the tabletop. His one surviving notebook lay open on the table at Katarina’s feet, its pages crinkled but dry.

Reaching out over Katarina’s body, Dieter began to shape the air above his sister’s corpse, making the same gestures of conjuration he had seen Drakus make and that he himself had performed on that dreadful night almost a month before. He began to chant, the words revealed before him within the charred, water-damaged pages of the notebook.

The Brauzeit wind beat against the walls of the house, rattling the windows in their frames and sending the flickering candlelight into a frenzied dance. The air thickened. The temperature dropped.

Dieter continued to chant. He could hear chattering laughter echoing as from another room in the house. The darkness drew in, shadows running like quicksilver across the walls. What little light there was dimmed still further.

An insistent buzzing, like the drone of flies inside his skull, rose in Dieter’s ears. Leopold’s Hanser’s face, a lifeless, rotting mask, loomed into view in his mind’s eye.

Katarina’s hair began to stream out around her head, fluttering with frostflowers, teased by some unseen, esoteric wind.

In mid-flow Dieter stopped chanting and picking up the book, in one fluid motion hurled it into the grate of the fireplace behind him with a scream of pent-up grief and rage. He would not do this to his beloved sister. He would not consign her to such a blasphemous fate. He could not do that to the one person he had loved in this world since his mother’s death thirteen years before.

The book burst into flame at once, the fire in the grate rising to become a roaring inferno, so that Dieter had to shield his face from its intense white heat. In only a minute the book was reduced to ash and glowing embers that were sent swirling up the chimney on the rising thermals. The fire, having raged so fiercely and so intensely, had burnt itself out.

Dieter collapsed on the floorboards of the pitch-black dining room and sobbed himself into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.

On the day of her seventeenth birthday, Katarina Heydrich was interred in the cold ground of Morr’s field, next to her mother and father.

There was no sign of Engels Lothair this time, so Dieter and Josef saw to the burial themselves. Few dared come to the plague village.

“Lord Morr,” Dieter whispered under his breath as Josef cast the first shovelfuls of earth over Katarina’s coffin, “although I am sure I am beyond your forgiveness now, I pray nonetheless that you take your devoted child Katarina into your kingdom and guard her soul until the crack of doomsday.”

The bitterness he had harboured in his heart for the god of death had gone, to be replaced by penitent regret. The plans of gods were far beyond the comprehension of mortal man.

The day after the funeral, Dieter walked alone through the oak woods beyond the village where he and Katarina had played together as children, seeking solace where the Chapel of Morr could offer none to his troubled soul. It was here beneath the spreading oak canopy that the Heydrich children had escaped their strange, strained lives for a while, escaping into worlds of their own imaginings, of noble knights and sorcerous maidens, of monsters and magic, even, ironically, acting out the parts of witch hunter and witch.

He trod the woodland paths, his boots squelching through the sodden leaf mulch covering the ground in a sludgy layer. He eventually emerged at the foot of Raven’s Crag tor and the blasted tower that stood atop it, a mile and a half from the village. It was said that there were dungeons beneath the ruin but the roof had fallen in long ago and buried the entrance to them. It was just a dark stone shell now.

To the west the river ran past the limits of the tillable pastures into peaty marshland. To the north, beyond the trees in the shadow of the Skaag Hills was the site of an ancient battle, fought between the primitive tribes people who had also dotted the landscape hereabouts with their burial mounds and pagan tumuli shrines.

It felt, to Dieter, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In fact he had not realised that he had been feeling on edge for so long. For the first time in months he felt that he was free of the curse of his unnatural “gift” the malign Doktor Drakus had awoken within him.

With the burning of the last of his books, months of study—the labour of the best part of a year of his life—had literally gone up in smoke. And it had taken the death of his dear sister for Dieter to realise that his practice of the dark arts should be put to rest with her.

No matter how tragic and momentous these two events were, and no matter what feelings of guilt and sadness they might provoke, Dieter could at last rest and recuperate from all the physical, mental and emotional stress he had endured in recent months, safe in the knowledge that he had at least conquered the darkness within himself, the darkness that had always been there, waiting for an outlet.

It was as if he had faced one last test on the way to proving that he was ready to be redeemed and, although it had come at the ultimate cost, he had prevailed. He had become used to losing people in the past and he would acclimatise to the inevitability again now.

Perhaps he was destined to achieve great things in the name of Shallya, or even Morr, after all. As well as having trained for some months as a physician and displayed some natural aptitude in that area he also considered himself to be suitably qualified to go into the service of Morr. He had the skills he had inherited from his father. And having seen the other side of death first hand that year could only help him better understand what, as a priest of Morr, he would be expected to guard against. After all, as his father had once said, that which does not kill you only serves to make you stronger.

Of one thing he was certain, it was time to start a new life, away from the decadent corruption of Bögenhafen. He called to mind all that had come to pass in the nine months since he had secured a place at the physicians’ guild there and left Hangenholz to pursue his studies. Those memories left an ashen taste on his tongue now.

Being at home, in the place of his birth again, had made Dieter see sense at last and secured his change of heart. He was decided. He would return home to Hangenholz permanently and find what course his life would take there. What little he had left in the world that mattered to him was here, in Hangenholz. He would set up as a doktor, perhaps even train as a priest of Morr, and earn the people’s respect and acceptance.

But before he could do that there were some loose ends he needed to tie up elsewhere. What was done was done, but it was time he made amends for his transgressions.

It was time to return to Bögenhafen.

It was time to confess.

KALDEZEIT

Down Among the Dead Men

I have committed all manner of evils in my unnaturally extended life as a necromancer, but the irony is that I was made a necromancer by the misguided actions of others.

When Ernst Krieger accused me of being that dire spectre the Corpse Taker at our first meeting, I was, as yet, innocent of any crime. If that accursed witch hunter had put me to the ordeal of Madame Rack and inevitably found me unjustly guilty, I would have been burnt at the heretic’s stake and died as an innocent, instead of that wretch Anselm Fleischer.

But the true greatest irony is that if the irrational brother-captain had had me put to death, I would not have lived to become the very thing that the witch-hunting Templars of Sigmar set out so puritanically to out destroy. I would not have become the very thing that Krieger had accused me of being.

So I ask you, who was it that drove me to commit so many unspeakable acts of depraved wickedness? Who was it that made me evil? And what is one man’s traitor but another man’s redeemer anyway?

The carriage rumbled along the Nuln road under a bruised grey sky. Kaldezeit had arrived in the Reikland, bringing with it near freezing temperatures and lending the icy air the sharp cold smell of death. Ground mist covered the swathes of yellowed meadow that lay beyond the skeletal trees lining the road. Following the bitter frosts of Kaldezeit, in all too little time Bögenhafen would enjoy its first falls of Ulriczeit snow.

But the stagecoach’s only passenger was oblivious to all of this. Dieter Heydrich’s mind was on other things.

It had taken him two weeks to tie up his affairs in Hangenholz and the nearby market-hub of Karltenschloss so that everything would be ready for him when he returned from Bögenhafen. Back in Hangenholz, Dieter had begun to treat those for whom the plague had been a life-threatening condition. And his patients had started to get better. He had begun to feel part of the community there for the first time in years. He had also slept well for the first time in as long as he could remember, his dreams no longer haunted by the restless dead.

With the black pox all but eradicated in Hangenholz, Dieter had set off for Bögenhafen for the last time, on the thirtieth day of Brauzeit. The coaching companies were still not able to run a full service and besides, business was slow. But eventually Dieter had persuaded a number of different drivers to carry him on short legs of the journey so that on the afternoon of Wellentag, the second day of Kaldezeit, he came within sight of the market town’s ominously looming walls again.

He remembered the excitement he had felt when he had first seen those towering battlements. Now the sight left him feeling cold, with a bitter taste in his mouth. There was nothing here for him now.

Dieter could not return to the guild; too many questions would be asked. Too many people knew too much or had too great an interest invested in the one they had called the Daemon’s Apprentice. And that was assuming that he would be welcome there; that Professor Theodrus would accept his prodigal protégé back into the fold. No, too much water had flowed under that bridge which Dieter had then quite successfully burnt.

Dieter still had what was left of his father’s money but there was no place for him in Bögenhafen. Brother-Captain Krieger was still securely ensconced within the templar chapter house, as far as he knew, and he would always be watched.

He was as much an outcast from the town and the guild, as he had been as a child, the son of a priest of Morr, living in Hangenholz. Dieter was giving up on the dream that had become a nightmare. After all, he had nothing to lose anymore.

But there was also hope in his heart, in spite of all this. He had decided upon the course he wanted his life to take. He had been wrong to ever leave Hangenholz, and there was a place for him there now, a role to fulfil, helping to rebuild the plague-ravaged community. Dieter was also beginning to give credence to the old adage that some good really could come out of any evil. He would put all the skills and knowledge he had acquired at the guild of physicians to good use back in Hangenholz.

Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse was empty when he arrived. Having let himself into the attic room, Dieter half-expected to meet a crazed, pox-eaten, Erich and have to explain to him why he was leaving Bögenhafen. But no matter what his fellow apprentice of the dark arts said or did, Dieter was not going to be dissuaded from his chosen course of action.

But Erich wasn’t there.

Dieter glanced into the chaos and clutter that was Erich’s dark-shuttered room. Having seen that the youth wasn’t there, he did not want to linger any longer. Seeing the dissected bats, toads and rats pinned out on every conceivable surface—from the walls to the very head of Erich’s bed—brought back too many unpleasant memories; memories that he was trying his very best to expunge from his mind altogether.

It also smelt like something had died in the room. Dieter just wondered how many somethings it had actually been.

It was hard to determine how long it had been since anyone had been in the garret apartment. It could have been anything from several weeks to only that very morning; the place was in such a state of disarray.

Dieter found his own room just as he had left it on the day he had received Josef Wohlreich’s summons to Hangenholz. Anything that he might once have kept here that he now wished to forget had thankfully been taken to the warehouse and destroyed in the fire there. There was very little for him to do before he would be ready to leave Bögenhafen once and for all.

But before he went anywhere there was one last, vital obligation Dieter had to fulfil; one that he had sworn on his sister’s soul that he would carry out in her memory, in penance for all that he had done that he was now so ashamed of.

Sitting down at his desk, he took a clean piece of parchment from his scrip, along with his writing tools. Dipping his quill into the ink-well Dieter began to compose a letter, taking care to make sure that he got all of the details right, in the correct chronological order, but taking pains not to reveal his own identity as the writer.

His report finished, the paper folded and sealed, Dieter went out into the street and hailed an urchin who was tossing stones into the gutter. For a farthing the boy agreed to deliver the letter, running off down the street laughing excitedly.

Going back to his room, Dieter hauled his trunk from under his unmade bed. Those items which hadn’t been lost to the fire—a few clothes and little else—he quickly packed into the small chest that he had brought to Bögenhafen with him when he had first arrived at the beginning of the year, in Nachexen. He slung his battered scrip over his shoulder, quill, paper and ink safely stowed inside again, and prepared to heft the trunk back down the stairs and across town to the Reisehauschen.

He looked up and an icy chill entered his heart.

Standing in the doorway was Erich Karlsen. Having been in the company of normal people again for the last fortnight, Dieter realised just how unhealthy, unkempt and demented Erich had become. His robe alone looked like it had not been changed in weeks. Madness glinted in his eyes but the expression on his face was one of utter panic.

“Where have you been?” Erich asked sharply.

“I had to go home,” Dieter replied, not telling Erich any more, not wishing to vocalise the horrid truth behind his homecoming as that wound was still raw and it still hurt too open it again.

“B-But this is your home,” Erich said manically.

“Not anymore.”

Erich’s glittering eyes fell on the trunk on Dieter’s bed. “Where are you going? We have work to finish here.”

“Not anymore we don’t.”

“Oh, b-but we do,” Erich insisted, the look of desperation still written boldly across his features.

“What do you mean?” Dieter asked guardedly.

“I-It’s easier if I sh-show you.” The youth was now hopping from foot to foot in nervous anticipation. “Come quickly. I-It’s urgent!”

Dieter took off his scrip and laid it on the bed next to his trunk.

“Very well,” he agreed, “but it cannot take too long. I do not have much time to spare,” he said, thinking of the letter he had just sent.

He owed it to his old roommate to go with him, Dieter decided. It pained him to see Erich like this, and his roommate wouldn’t have been like this if it hadn’t been for his own obsessive quest to discover the identity of the mysterious Doktor Drakus. Dieter would go with him now, quickly, and then when the matter was resolved, whatever it might be, he would collect his luggage and set off on the return journey to Hangenholz.

Erich led Dieter out of Dunst Strasse, along the Eisen Bahn for a hundred yards and then down into the maze of back streets in the vicinity of the carpenters’ guild and Langen Strasse. As the pair hurried on their way they talked.

“Erich, where are we going?”

“I c-can’t tell you.”

“Why not? Are we heading for the docks?”

Erich paused before answering. “Y-Yes. Th-that’s right.”

“But I thought you said you couldn’t tell me.”

Logic seemed to have escaped Erich along with his senses.

“I-I c-can’t! B-Because you’ll be h-horrified.”

Dieter’s blood ran cold. What could it be that Erich was so desperate to show him and yet at the same time could not even bring himself to talk about?

Suddenly all of Dieter’s suppressed doubts and worries returned in a pulse racing moment of panic. Erich was pulling away, getting several steps ahead of him, turning into a narrow alleyway between looming neglected tenements, their doors marked with peeling red crosses.

“Erich!” he said, running after his companion and grabbing hold of the apprentice by the shoulders, spinning him round to face him. “Is it to do with Leopold?”

The look of apprehension melted from Erich’s face to be replaced by an even more unnerving smile.

“You could say that.”

Dieter let go of Erich’s shoulders and let his arms drop, taking a few slow steps away from the grinning maniac. As he did so he began to take in more of his surroundings. There was something uncomfortably familiar about the street in which they were now standing. Twisting his head round he took in the street sign secured to the disintegrating facade of a crumbling building and his suspicions were confirmed. He hadn’t been back to this street in over three months. Erich had led him back to Apothekar Allee.

Dieter took another step backwards as a black shape detached itself from a darkened doorway beside Erich. An appalled whimper escaped from Dieter’s open mouth. He thought that he was going to be sick.

Leopold Hanser’s corpse dragged itself a step closer, a low moan escaping its own blistered lips. The corpse was virtually unrecognisable but how could it be that of anyone else? Its flesh was a crisped black and red mess from the burns it had suffered as the warehouse fire consumed it. Its lank blond hair had burnt away completely. But the cadaver’s slack-jawed expression hadn’t changed, and Leopold’s corpse still wasn’t Dieter’s to control.

Dieter turned on his heel to run but then froze again. Advancing towards him with slow yet certain steps were two thugs he had hoped never to see again. The body snatchers—the town’s sexton and his collaborator—were blocking the end of the alleyway. To make matters worse, their shambling gait was that of Leopold’s walking corpse, and skin of their hands and faces had developed a sickly grey-green pallor.

In panic Dieter looked around him past his assailants to see if there was anyone around who could help him.

It was late afternoon; surely there was someone still about their daily business who could see what was going on!

But there was no one else.

Dieter’s eyes focused on the crosses daubed on the doors of the deserted street again and realised that the black pox had not left anyone alive here to witness the end of his life.

He turned back to face Erich and the undead Leopold again, reasoning that he had a greater chance of getting past them than the hulking body snatchers. But then it was too late and they were on him, all of them, rough hands grabbing at his body, their reeking charnel-stink making him gag.

Dieter screwed up his eyes, lest he have to look into the soulless pits of the corpses’ eye-sockets. He retaliated with his own hands, recoiling in revulsion as his fingers sank into clay-like flesh.

The shambling undead continued to press in on him, their fists abusing his body as much as their very appearance and death-reek assaulted his overwrought sensibilities, his mind strained to breaking point.

Dieter felt a sharp crack as something blunt connected with the back of his skull and he mercifully blacked out, his consciousness swallowed in black oblivion.

Awareness returned in a blaze of cranial agony. His body ached from the pummelling he had received at the clubbed fists of the zombies.

Dieter opened bleary eyes, expecting to see the vaulted ceiling of Doktor Drakus’ laboratory vault. Instead he found himself looking at a lower curved ceiling of damp dark stone, adorned with strings of mould and patterned with a faintly luminescent fungus. He could see the glistening nubs of tiny limestone stalactites coming into gloomy focus above him.

He tried to move and immediately felt a sharp pain across his shoulder blades and resistance against his legs. Rope rubbed against his wrists and when he tried to move his feet again he realised that his ankles had also been bound. There was a cold ridge of stone pressing against his spine. He could move his head, although he almost dared not, afraid of what he might see. However his inherent curiosity and sheer desperation won out in the end.

Dieter looked to his left. He was in an underground chamber of some kind, the murk illuminated by the luminescent growth speckling the walls and ceiling, and it didn’t take him long to work out what kind. A series of horizontal alcoves, each the length of a man and only a couple of feet in height, were recessed into the wall on the far side of the chamber. In each of these shadowy niches lay the skeletal remains of a human being. The rotten remnants of shrouds still clung to the bones of some of these revenants. All had been laid out with their bony hands clasped across the hollow cages of their ribs. Dusty spider webs festooned the calcified remains.

He was in a subterranean crypt. He guessed that it was somewhere within the bounds of the town cemetery. It could even have been underneath the Chapel of Morr itself. The small size of such mortuary temples often belied a more extensive complex of morgues, embalming rooms and burial chambers buried under the ground.

Dieter glanced to his right and saw the rectangular shape of a stone sarcophagus between him and the opposite wall. He guessed that he was tied to one like it. Craning his head back he could see the top of an inverted archway and the suggestion of statues either side of it in the darkness. He also thought he could see another sarcophagus tomb behind him.

There was a shuffling sound like the hem of a robe dragging over flagstones. Dieter looked back past his feet, pushing his chin down on his chest so that he could see what lay beyond the end of the tomb to which he had been lashed.

Straining his eyes to peer through the gloom he began to see shapes resolving there too; human figures. One of these solid shadows was moving towards him. Dieter’s heart thumped wildly in his chest. Was this mausoleum destined to become his final resting place too?

There was a sudden flare of light and a lantern glowed into life.

“So, you are awake,” a voice slithered.

The lantern swayed closer and Dieter looked into a face ruined by disease. The shrivelled skin was a mess of boils and weeping pustules, crusted with foul discharge. A tumourous growth covered most of the right eye. Dieter saw again the gaping sore at the side of the Corpse Taker’s mouth, the nose stripped of flesh by the pox.

Dieter gagged at the necromancer’s horrific appearance as much as at the accompanying stench of plague-rot that hung about him like his glyph-adorned robe. Dieter’s head felt heavy and groggy as if he had overindulged at the Cutpurse’s Hands the night before.

“Doktor Drakus!” he gasped, the plague-scarred creature peering over him with cataract-clouded eyes.

“That name will suffice I suppose,” the necromancer said, his voice a sibilant whisper. “It is certainly less conspicuous than that of Corpse Taker.”

Dieter saw now that it was not Drakus who was holding the lantern so as to inspect his prisoner’s body. The necromancer’s manservant stood silently at his shoulder, his cadaverous face white as polished marble in the flickering glow of the light he held.

“W-What do you want with me?” Dieter stammered, overwhelmed by the horror of the situation he now found himself in. He had to know why he had been brought to this place; he had to know why he was going to die.

“Can’t you guess?” the necromancer sneered and Dieter saw the gaping sore at the corner of his mouth split the evil smile even further across his cheek to a pox-eaten ear. “Your body is ripe for the taking. I want everything: your mind, body and soul.”

Dieter swallowed hard and tasted bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Was this how it had been for Anselm Fleischer? Was this what had driven the poor bastard mad?

“Why now? Why this night?” Dieter pressed.

“Because it is auspicious.”

The Corpse Taker pointed with a scabbed claw at what Dieter now saw was a body hanging from the back wall of the crypt.

The body of Father Hulbert, Bögenhafen’s own minister of Morr, had been suspended from manacles secured to iron fastenings hammered into the ceiling. Hulbert’s feet swung a few inches off the ground, just above the pool of the dead priest’s intestines unravelled on the floor beneath him.

Dieter felt his gorge rise again.

“C-can I see?” came a familiar voice from the corner of the crypt. Dieter was reminded of the last time he had heard that voice, when Erich Karlsen had betrayed him to the Corpse Taker.

The gangly student moved into the pool of queasy light, his madly staring eyes reflecting back the flickering lantern in the dark mirror of his pupils.

Dieter felt cold hatred knot his stomach and subconsciously tensed his muscles, straining against his bonds once again.

“I think we are ready to begin,” Drakus told his two accomplices.

“Begin what?” Dieter demanded.

Drakus fixed Dieter with his cataract stare, which was none the less piercing in spite of the clouded lenses. “This will hurt you more than it will hurt me,” the necromancer hissed.

Panic gripped the physician’s apprentice. Dieter pulled on the ropes again, feeling them chafe the skin at his wrists. He had to free himself. He could feel the cords snagging on the rough edges of the sarcophagus. Perhaps he could break them that way. He pulled again. And again. And again.

Drakus and his manservant began to chant, just as they had done beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Only now they were joined by another in the enactment of their iniquitous rite: Erich Karlsen.

The eerie sound echoed from the algae-stained walls, filling the mausoleum with spine-chilling, supernatural harmonics. It sounded as if ghostly voices were joining in the summoning of the winds of death to this place. And as always there were the half-heard noises of rustling wing cases and scuttling legs.

The words had a familiar flavour for Dieter now. In response to their resonances, images erupted unbidden from the heart of darkness he had buried deep within himself.

He saw all manner of grotesque and grisly manifestations of death. Old Gelda, her tongue cut out, blood dribbling from her mouth, trying to scream as the heavily hooded Kreuzfahrer pushed the burning brand into the headman’s hand. Festering necrotic tissue. Erich’s cat coming to spitting life in the eerie light of the twin moons. Animal skulls picked clean by carrion feeders and bleached yellow by the wind and sun. The last precious bubbles of oxygen escaping from the lungs of a drowning man. Dieter’s own hands closing around Leopold Hanser’s scrawny neck.

He heard the hollow boom of crypt doors slamming shut. The creaking of wind-blown gallows. The tap of bare bone against a headstone. A mother wailing for her stillborn child. Pigs screaming as they met the slaughterman. The death-knell proclaiming Katarina’s death.

He could smell blood, mould, the stink of burning fat. Tasted rancid maggoty meat, the earthy flavour of grave-dirt, the tang of blood, the bitter aftertaste of vomit. Felt the stygian blackness reach for him, enclose him, smother him.

Dieter looked past the images appearing within his mind’s eye, as if in their own violent death-throes, at the necromancer standing over him. A shimmering black light surrounded Drakus like an aura of coruscating darkness. It suffused the air above the sarcophagus and coiled itself into disturbing silhouettes as the sorcerer’s pockmarked hands danced over Dieter’s body.

The air was filled with an insistent buzzing, like the scraping of a saw on the inside of his skull. Liquid darkness ran like blood across the walls.

The dark magic coalescing within the chamber was a tangible presence to Dieter. He could feel its stinging icy tentacles coiling around his arms, his legs, his torso, and even forcing their way inside him. An agonising, brain-splitting pressure was building behind his eyes. It was the same terrible pressure he had felt when he had witnessed Drakus’ evil awakening rite, as thunderous and oppressive as a building storm front. Lightning crackled across the surface of Dieter’s brain.

Drakus reached down and steepled the bony fingers of his right hand onto his prisoner’s sweat-slick forehead. Dieter let out a cry of surprise and pain. There was someone else inside his mind. At first the alien consciousness probed and poked at the surface of his mind, as a physician might investigate an open wound. But an instant later the necromancer pushed his scalpel-sharp will inside Dieter’s skull and took possession of his mind.

Pain such as the young man had never known before flared through every fibre of his being. He arched his back in convulsing agony, the muscles in his body going into spasm. But somehow Dieter knew that this torturous pain was what came as a consequence of great power, and part of him thrilled at that dark realisation.

He had never felt power like it. It was at least ten times what he had felt when he succeeded in raising Leopold Hanser from the dead.

Suddenly he was experiencing another existence in another place, at another time, as well as enduring what was happening to him here and now in the sepulchral darkness of the mausoleum.

Through Drakus’ haunted memories, with the necromancer’s own eyes, Dieter saw how, with perfect irony, a man driven to prolong his own life by whatever means necessary had contracted the plague. He saw the necromancer fleeing from an angry pitchfork-waving mob. He watched—an omniscient observer—as the sorcerer came to Bögenhafen under the pall of night, how he assumed the identity of Doktor Drakus and carried out his foul research so that he might find a way to rid himself of the rapacious, flesh-wasting disease.

Dieter still wondered how he himself had avoided succumbing to the vile black pox himself. Was it because he had been marked by Morr, or had some other malevolent force marked him out as its own?

Amidst the turmoil raging like a cyclone inside his mind, realisation dawned. It was Drakus who had ultimately brought the curse of the plague upon Bögenhafen, the vermin infesting his laboratory-vault carrying the black pox to the wider world beyond the house in Apothekar Allee.

As he continued to share Drakus’ awareness, Dieter saw the necromancer performing the very same ritual he was attempting now, only this time with Anselm Fleischer instead of himself. He saw the misguided fool’s psyche collapse under the pressure, his mind not strong enough to contain Drakus’ undying spirit. He saw the ritual fail. It had cost the necromancer almost as dearly as the sanity-robbed Anselm, bringing Drakus to the verge of death. It had taken him months to recover.

Dieter felt that he himself could slip into inescapable insanity at any moment. It had become a true battle of the wills now as, with the sweat pouring off him, Dieter physically strained to force the necromancer out of his mind.

Now Dieter was back in Doktor Drakus’ cellar, only he was not watching the scene through his own omniscient eyes but through those of the necromancer. He saw his own unconscious form lying on the floor of the crypt. He saw a petrified Erich prostrate himself before the Corpse Taker, begging his mercy, promising to do anything if the necromancer would only spare his life. He heard the necromancer and the apprentice make their unholy bargain—Erich’s life in return for Dieter’s soul—and witnessed them seal the pact with Erich’s blood.

Erich had been Drakus’ pawn ever since, manipulating Dieter in the cruellest way imaginable. Dieter was able to fill in the rest himself: Erich carrying him back to their lodgings in Dunst Strasse, observing his progress after the change Drakus had forced in him, encouraging him to develop his necromantic abilities and strengthen his mind, Dieter’s friend becoming his betrayer, unknown to the impressionable country boy, acting as Drakus’ spy, judging when Dieter had honed his talents enough and become a suitable vessel into which Drakus might transfer his malevolent soul.

It had not been Dieter who had driven Erich mad at all. It had been the older youth’s bond with the Corpse Taker that had caused him to steadily lose his grasp on reality. This bitter insight brought Dieter back to the present with a jolting shock.

He knew that he was going to die. For the briefest of moments he wondered whether he should let Drakus finish him, rather than let the black sorcery he had turned his back on use him again for its own foul purpose. It was nothing less than he deserved.

But then the tiny part of Dieter’s mind that was still his, and that was still rational, realised the awful consequence of such an action. If Drakus succeeded in what he was trying to do—if Dieter simply gave into him—the Corpse Taker would live on in a renewed body and with renewed vigour, able to see the fulfilment of his evil schemes, whatever they might be.

The necromancer had to be confident that his plans would come to fruition on this night, for having been so careful to keep himself hidden for so long, Drakus had taken a great risk by killing the town’s sextons and Father Hulbert. He was obviously not intending to remain in Bögenhafen much longer, not unless he had something even more shockingly atrocious in mind. After all, in the wake of the plague there had been a huge increase in the number of fresh corpses buried within the environs of Bögenhafen: a veritable army. The army Dieter had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares. Dieter had no choice but to fight the necromancer. And besides, he wasn’t ready to let death take him just yet, as it had taken every last member of his family.

Fighting back the pain, Dieter inhaled deeply, feeling talons pressing against his skull, feeling the necromancer’s dark intelligence crushing his psyche, as if Drakus was squeezing his very soul from him. As the mildewed air of the mausoleum filled his lungs, Dieter focused on the horrific unreal sensations overwhelming his senses.

His mother lying cold in her grave. Rats burrowing whiskered noses into the soft parts of his body, elongated incisors biting and tearing. The ring of a whetstone on an executioner’s axe. Blighted crops. The abattoir-stink of the slaughterhouse. The highwaymen butchering the coach driver and his passengers. A platter of furred rotten fruit, turning to black sludge in the fusty heat of summer, thick with flies. The acrid taste of soured milk. Hordes of zombies bearing the marks of the plague, and the faces of the people of Bögenhafen, marching to make war against the living; their leprous bodies blotched with rot and riven with maggots.

With the last shreds of his conscious mind, Dieter distilled the sights, smells and sounds back into the eldritch, ethereal matter out of which they had originally grown, watching them melt and dissolve into an inky morass as he drew the dark power from the essence of death itself congealing within the crypt, focusing them into a single point, into one thought: that he wanted to live.

And that one simple desire took form.

A bolt of dark energy blasted out of Dieter, exploding from him in a catastrophic shockwave of lethal power. It slammed into Drakus and his moribund manservant, hurling them backwards. Erich stumbled and fell to the floor of the crypt, as the chamber shook. There was a sharp crack as he hit his head on the flagstones and was knocked senseless. The echoes of the chanted mantra died, swallowed up by the cloying air.

The unnatural mental connection was broken. Dieter felt numb with cold and yet at the same time every nerve ending in his body was on fire.

The eldritch wind rose to become a screaming gale that tore through the crypt, tugging at the grave-clothes of the skeletons in their niches and swirling the sorcerer’s robes around him as the necromancer got to his feet.

“Such power!” Drakus gasped, tasting Dieter’s aura. “I can see it blazing like black fire in the orbs of your eyes. But it is not enough to stop me!” he roared with malice burning in his own cataract-clouded eyes.

Dieter strained against the ropes holding him. He focused his mind on the bindings, seeing the hemp rotting away over time. The rope dissolved and Dieter rolled off the sarcophagus, landing on his hands and knees on the flagstoned floor. His kneecaps and wrists jarred painfully but it was nothing compared to the agony flaring along every nerve in his body as the dark energy surged through him in an uncontrollable torrent, like a howling gale.

He struggled to his feet, using the sarcophagus for support. He breathed in deeply, gulping in stale air as he felt a twinge in his chest. Had he cracked a rib? Or was it another side-effect of drawing on the esoteric energies of the dead?

Dieter heard a shout, a barked command. Drakus was holding his hands to his shrivelled skull.

Figures that had been standing propped against the walls of the crypt, as motionless as marionettes waiting for the puppet master’s will to give them life, lurched towards Dieter as Drakus’ flesh-puppets jerked into stilted life.

Father Hulbert’s corpse thrashed against the wall where it hung, twisting spastically from the iron manacles, the rope of its intestines slapping wetly against the floor as it spasmed.

The zombies advanced on Dieter with slow yet relentless steps. The two body snatchers, their septic faces spoiled by rot, were closing on him from behind. Their hulking forms blocked his escape route up the steps out of the crypt. And the charred-flesh form of Leopold Hanser was bearing down on him from the other side. The smell of overcooked meat hung heavy about Leopold’s carcass.

Dieter recoiled again before the mindless monster he had created. Looking into that slack-jawed, fire-blistered face was like staring into the face of his own mortality.

To his right were the obstructions of the sarcophagi, to his left the burial alcoves of the ancient dead. He was trapped, and he was going to die. There would be no salvation for him now.

Dieter gazed in horror into the dead eyes of the zombies. It was said that the eyes were the windows to the soul. The zombies’ glassy stares told him that there were no souls left inside the macabre shells of their reanimated bodies.

Oppressive shadows closed in on Dieter once more.

He inhaled again, ignoring the pain in his chest this time, welcoming the approaching dark. And now it seemed to Dieter’s mage-altered sight that rivulets of glistening darkness were running like fluid obsidian across the floor of the crypt to pool at his feet, before being absorbed into his body as he began to shape his own spell.

Drakus’ ritual of awakening, all those months ago, had roused a monster lurking inside him, a sinister latent force that had lain dormant throughout his life until he had reached adulthood and fate had brought him to Bögenhafen. But where had that power come from? Had it been because of his upbringing? Had it been due to veneration of Morr and all things funereal?

From an early age Dieter had been exposed to death in its various forms, archaic funeral rites, and the dwelling places of the dead. He had been left traumatised as a child by his mother’s death. As he entered adulthood he had been drawn to death. He had sought a profession that dealt with death, or at least supposedly its prevention, on a daily basis.

He had tried to deny his heritage; he had tried to become a physician, a healer of the sick, but fate, or nature, had determined that he should become a killer, a dealer in death. From the very beginning, his upbringing and life experiences had prepared him for this moment, had prepared him to take on the mantle of the necromancer. He had fought his inherent dark nature and had lost.

Dieter did not know where the enchantment came from, but it came nonetheless. He could hear the drumming of rib bones on stretched skin. The drumming grew louder until his head throbbed as though the bone-beaters were hammering on his eardrums. He felt the cold wind of Shyish, blowing right through him as if he were no more corporeal than a ghost, drawn to this place of necromancy and death.

And Dieter understood why it was so easy to raise the dead in this place. The power had always been here, residing within the mortuary crypt, a source of great and terrible power waiting be tapped. That was why he had been able to resurrect Leopold in the warehouse. By killing his friend there Dieter had consecrated the place by the act to the forces of death, and encouraged the darkest winds of sorcery to blow there more readily.

Dieter didn’t need his notebooks or hours of preparation, to work his spells in the mausoleum either. Drakus was drawing the power of death from this place and Dieter was able to use it just as well. But there was no doubt as to which was the more powerful will at work here. Dieter could still feel the Corpse Taker’s malignant presence lingering at the edge of his conscious self. There was no time to waste. Dieter had to act fast whilst Drakus was still reeling from the shock of his initial assault.

The dark apprentice cast his spell.

Blood, hot and sticky, gushed from Dieter’s nose as the dark power gathering behind his eyes was released in a second conjuration. The bitter black bile taste filled his mouth and he doubled up, beset by agonising, stabbing gastric pains. But his suffering mattered not: the spell had worked.

Coils of palpable darkness extruded from Dieter’s fingertips—drawn from the hurricane of eldritch power raging within the mausoleum—and wound through the shimmering air into the wall alcoves. The black mist wrapped itself around the bones lying there, shrouding them in a cloak of writhing shadows that pulled the bones together, creating bonds of darkness where in life there had been knotty strings of sinew and ligaments. In a hollow clatter of rattling bones, three skeletons pulled themselves free of their stone shelves, dragging threads of cobwebs with them.

Amidst the pain, Dieter felt a certain grim satisfaction that he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had raised the dead.

The skeletons moved with jerking insect-like movements towards Drakus’ shambling undead. The zombies, in response, turned on the bone mannequins, groaning hungrily. A fist like a lump hammer smashed into the ribcage of a skeleton, shattering its sternum, as chattering teeth sank into the meat of the sexton’s arm. A hand that was made of nothing but bare bone clawed the face of the other dead gravedigger, tearing open a cheek, so that the zombie’s own champing teeth could be seen. The last of the skeletons leapt on Leopold’s corpse, tearing at the crackling of its blackened hide, its jaws closing around the flesh-puppet’s head.

Dieter’s vision was beginning to grey at its periphery. He felt utterly exhausted. Maintaining the sheer physicality of the skeletons was taking an extreme toll on his body. He could feel the strain in every muscle, every sinew, every nerve flaring with pain. He had nothing more to give.

A spear of dark energy slammed into a skeleton, sending it hurtling across the chamber to shatter against the far wall. The same fate befell a second and then the third was obliterated in an explosion of bone.

Doktor Drakus had recovered and his wrath was terrible indeed. But he wasn’t going to rush his revenge. He was going to savour every moment he spent punishing Dieter for his audacity.

Through a combination of luck, will power and sheer terror Dieter had managed to raise the dead in order to defend himself. Yet he lacked the power, and more importantly the control, that one so well practiced in the Black Arts as Drakus possessed. And the Corpse Taker was showing him who was still the true master here. Now it was time for Dieter to die.

The apprentice was aware of the insistent buzzing again, a sound like rusted metal teeth sawing bone.

The bolt of pure, concentrated malevolence hit him squarely between the eyes and sent him sliding across the floor. Dieter was gripped by a violent seizure, which crippled him as a series of thrashing paroxysms convulsed his body. Foamy saliva spurted from between clenched teeth.

It was as if the veil of mortality had been torn down from before his eyes.

Dieter Heydrich stared in heart-stopping horror into the oblivion of the void. And it recognised him as its own.

He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves somewhere outside, the shouts of men and then the sound of booted feet running down the stone steps into the tomb. The shouts grew louder. Drakus spat something in the unholy tongue of the lords of undeath. There was the clash of steel upon stone, the wet thunk of blades meeting flesh and a god-fearing oath.

Dieter opened tear-blurred eyes and looked upon the mortal world of shadows again in time to see Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger confront the Corpse Taker’s undead.

The bastard received my letter then, he thought.

Sigmar alone knew how the templars had tracked Drakus to this place and at this time. Then again, a garden of Morr would be the first place a witch hunter would look for a necromancer.

“In the name of Sigmar, I renounce you!” Krieger bellowed, laying a blow against a re-formed skeleton that was now fighting for the black-hearted necromancer. “I smite your evil in the name of the holy Heldenhammer!”

The skeleton fell, its backbone severed. Krieger’s two lieutenants were grappling with the hulking gravedigger’s zombie and that of Leopold Hanser.

Dieter rolled over onto his side and tried to stand. He was suddenly horribly aware that he had soiled himself.

Shrieking, the necromancer’s manservant ran at the witch hunter captain, hands become talons raised before him. Dieter saw Krieger’s blade, blazing with the holy golden light of Sigmar himself, open the retainer’s body across the middle. A torrent of maggots, grubs and many-legged crawling things cascaded out of the dry husk of a man. The withered leathery remains of the manservant shrank to the ground like a deflating pig’s bladder as beetles, centipedes and mealworms wriggled free of it, escaping into the cracks between the flagstones.

Dieter was now on his knees. The exit from the mausoleum lay before him, unobstructed.

A strong arm clamped down on his shoulder and Dieter looked up to into the furious fear-enlarged eyes of one of Krieger’s burly lieutenants, as the man raised his sword ready to impale Dieter’s corrupted heart on the tip of his sword. The man obviously took him to be one of the necromancer’s servants.

Then, just as abruptly, the witch hunter was hauled from Dieter’s view as a hulking mass of decomposing hunger and fury yanked the witch hunter off his feet and into the shadows with a sharply cut-off cry. Dieter scrambled to his feet and staggered up the stairs out of the tomb, into the cold Kaldezeit night.

He stumbled onto his knees on the gravel path outside the tomb-structure, retching violently. His head span with a nauseous migraine. Lights flashed like miniature lightning strikes before his eyes. The clamour of battle echoed up from the subterranean burial chamber behind him.

Dieter felt utterly drained of all sensation, all emotion. The skin of his face felt drawn and waxy as he wiped the sweat from his brow and cheeks.

He had peered over the edge of existence and gazed into the oblivion of the eternal abyss. It was a vision that would have been enough to drive most men mad in an instant, or kill them on the spot from sheer terror. That was what Dieter realised he feared most now. More than anything else he feared the end of existence. The cruel awareness of that cold, depthless void had chilled him to the marrow, to his very death-touched soul.

There was no afterlife, no well-deserved rest in the realm of Morr. There was nothing more beyond this life, other than an eternity of unbearable torment as one of a billion lost souls howling their insane agony to the all-consuming void, knowing that there was nothing more than this.

It was that knowledge that made Dieter want more than anything else in the world to never have to face death in that way again.

But whatever else had happened that fateful night, Dieter knew that it was only just the beginning: That which does not kill you only serves to make you stronger.

He struggled to his feet once more. He didn’t dare return to his lodgings in the town, not now. The witch hunters would soon realise that he was not amongst the dead in the tomb and that he had given them the slip. They would come looking for him and he knew that Brother-Captain Krieger would not be happy until he had hunted the Daemon’s Apprentice down like a dog and made him pay for his crimes.

With the garden of Morr dwindling into the darkness behind him, and half maddened by fear, Dieter Heydrich fled into the night.

And the night welcomed him, enfolding him in its deathly embrace.

The Confession of

Brother Matteus

“And so I left Bögenhafen, never to return.”

His story finished, the old man sank back into the bed. Silence rushed in to fill the void, left in the wake of the almost hypnotic sound of his creaking voice, a deafening hush ringing in the confessor’s ears.

For a moment Ludwik was granted a vision of an endless, aching darkness, which although impenetrable in its blackness, he knew continued on into infinity. It was a depthless gulf that swallowed up everything that was drawn into it, an infinite abyss of doom and despair. It was enough to make Ludwik feel a moment of icy doubt, that perhaps what he had spent his life believing and preaching had been nothing but a desperate, pitiful lie.

Father Ludwik sat back in his chair again, rubbing his temples with calloused fingers as if that might somehow help clear the fog of uncertainty and malefic scepticism from his mind. Only then did he realise that he had been so gripped by Brother Matteus’ story that he had leaned forward to listen all the more intently.

Ludwik felt a sudden chill shiver through him that made frozen muscles spasm and his whole body flinch. He pulled his robe tighter about him. His feet were numb with cold and the skin of his face felt tight and pinched. He had been so engrossed in the old man’s confession that he had not even realised that the fire had died in the hearth.

What time was it, Ludwik wondered, his mind distracted? How long had the dying priest’s account lasted? The brother must have been talking for long hours into the night. As well as feeling frozen to the marrow, there was a gnawing hunger in Ludwik’s belly; or was it the gnawing doubt that gripped him now? He was still reeling from the revelations of Brother Matteus’ confession—or Dieter Heydrich, or whatever his name was.

Ludwik took a deep breath, trying to order his thoughts and make sense of what he had heard. Then he let the breath out again in a long sigh.

“Well, brother, that was quite some story,” was actually all he could think to say to fill the ringing silence.

“Everything I have told you has been the truth,” Matteus said, a darker edge to his voice. “Everything.”

Ludwik had to admit that it had been a rather complex and, in its own way, remarkably coherent story for a madman to concoct and maintain, if it really had been a fabrication of lies, delusions and half-truths.

“I cannot absolve you of a lifetime of sins such as this; only Morr can pass judgement on that regard.” If Morr were really there, he added to himself. “I am sorry to say that, if you are telling me the truth, no matter how you might have come to tread that path of necromancy, you were damned from the moment you took the first step.”

“You misunderstand me. I do not seek absolution for my sins,” Brother Matteus said. There was an unnerving tone of delight in the dying priest’s voice.

“But you begged me to hear your confession,” Ludwik protested, anxiety edging his own voice.

“Yes. A fabrication, I’m afraid. I confess that was a lie. But I assure you, everything I have told you since has been the truth whether you dare admit it to yourself or not makes no difference. It all happened. The truth has its uses at times, as do lies. I only told you my story to buy myself a few more precious minutes. I am dying, yes—gunned down at last by that whoreson witch hunter—but that does not mean that I am as weak as I might appear.”

Father Ludwik felt a nauseous wave rising within him. The elderly brother’s voice was sounding stronger—much stronger—and had done for quite some time. There was no way that the rattling-lunged old man who had started his deathbed confession would have been able to maintain such a recount for so long. It was almost as if the old man had recovered his strength with the telling of the tale. And his confessor had been completely drawn in by it, hypnotised by the wheezing voice.

Father Ludwik suddenly felt colder than he had ever felt since he had entered the room. What could have caused the temperature in the room to plummet so dramatically? The fire was already out. The door was still closed.

It was as if the cold hand of death had taken hold of his heart and was slowly squeezing every last degree of warmth from his body.

The wind whistling under the door of the cell and down the chimney could almost be keening ethereal voices. He could almost believe he could see phantom shapes moving at the periphery of his vision in the shadowed corners of the room. But when he shifted his gaze to look at them, they disappeared, only to reappear, half-seen and unfocused, at the extremity of his vision again.

“I simply had to keep you talking long enough that I might gather my strength for this body to carry out one final action.”

“Why?” was all Ludwik could manage. “For what purpose?”

“Because I too am one of those sorcerers who pitifully clings onto life. I know what I am and I cannot change that; I do not want to change that. I will hold on to what little semblance of life I still possess as tightly as I held onto Leopold’s neck as I squeezed the life out of him. Because I have seen what awaits us on the other side of this transient mortal veil.”

Frost drew icy fingers across the windowpane. Ludwik looked to the bowl of water Brother Oswald had placed on the floor beside the bed. The surface of the water was becoming misty and opaque as it turned to ice. The flickering shadows ran together in the encroaching darkness. The lonely candle-flame fizzled and dimmed.

Horrific images exploded in a brainstorm inside Ludwik’s mind. Hammering the last nail into the lid of a coffin as the person trapped inside beat against the other side, their screams muffled by the wood. Severed limbs. Scalping a cleric of Sigmar as he prayed before a shrine of the Heldenhammer. The creaking of the gallows scaffold. Administering last rites to a man drowning in his own fluids as they filled his lungs. Gouged eyes. Another corpse being cast into a quick-limed mass grave dug from the frozen ground. The coppery tang of blood in the mouth. Brother Matteus coughing up splatters of scarlet with his last breath. The insane, wailing voices of all those souls he had blessed and, in doing so, consigned to the freezing oblivion of the abyss, thinking that he was sending them on into Morr’s realm of eternal rest. Images of things which had been, things which might yet be, memories that were not his to know.

“Come closer, father. I am failing fast.”

Ludwik could not resist. Reeling from the horrifying mental assault he realised that he was doing exactly as the old man wanted, and he could not stop himself. There was a stronger mind at work here than his. He was no more than a puppet being manipulated by the old man’s steel will.

The priest leaned closer. The dying Brother Matteus’ bony hands grabbed him in a surprisingly strong—frighteningly strong—vice-like grip, pulling him closer still.

“I perfected Drakus’ technique.”

The evil old man opened his stinking, charnel-breathed mouth, and Ludwik stared madly, his gaze being drawn into the black pit of his gaping maw. It was as if the old man’s mouth opened too far, as if his jaw had dislocated like a snake’s.

The only sound that escaped Ludwik’s own gaping mouth was a pathetic whimper. In his heightened state of delusional terror, he fancied that he could see a dark wisp of smoke or mist escape from between the dying man’s lips, accompanied by a macabre, rasping sound that could only be his death rattle.

And then it felt like something was in his mouth, pushing against the back of his throat, forcing him to swallow. There was nothing there, he was sure of it—how could there be?—but it felt as if something had slipped down his throat as he swallowed. Something foul tasting and glutinous, wriggling like a blood-engorged leech.

Then he wasn’t aware of anything anymore, other than the dark thoughts creeping into his mind. Dark thoughts of a lifetime of evil—several lifetimes, by the measure of mortal men—gnawing away at the edges of his mind, eating away at his memories and his consciousness like acid. He was unable to retaliate against such an unexpected attack from an indomitable will that had existed for far longer than he had, that had held off death for so long, that had the strength to will the dead from their graves to do his dark bidding. And in that brief moment Ludwik knew that everything the old man had told him had been chillingly true.

Brother Matteus’ body fell back onto the bed, the vital spark of life gone from it at last.

Father Ludwik stretched, flexing the joints in his neck, hearing the vertebrae crack, and smiled. It was a cold, hard smile. A smile of unadulterated evil satisfaction.

This new body felt strange, ungainly, but it pulsed with life and had a good many decades left in it yet. It would serve him well. There was still so much more to be done to bring his great masterwork to fruition.

But first, he had other matters to attend to; matters of revenge. Valetin Krieger, whose family line had harassed and hunted him across the centuries, deserved his own personal attention for shooting him. He would soon know what it meant to cross a necromancer.

A sinister chuckle escaped his twisted lips.

Father Ludwik turned to leave the room, half thinking that to maintain this pretence he would need to summon someone to deal with the corpse, and caught his reflection in a looking glass hanging on the wall by the door.

The predatory smile broadened.

“Yes, I think I shall enjoy wearing this body of yours,” Dieter Heydrich told Father Ludwik’s reflection.

Then he was gone from the cold cell, where the dying went to die, and the world was his for the slaughtering once again.

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