Witch Finder

by C. L. Werner

  The sorcerer-prophet halted only a few feet from Weichs, the bleary red eyes glaring at the human physician. ‘Not rest!’ Skilk’s thin voice hissed. ‘Work-work! Find-learn, yes?’ The grey seer’s nose twitched again, at the decanter still gripped in Weichs’s hand. The doktor smiled weakly, arresting the motion before he accidentally displayed any teeth – a gesture the skaven used among themselves as a sign of aggression.

  ‘Estalian brandy, grey seer,’ Weichs explained. ‘Perhaps you might forgive a man his humble vices?’ Skilk bobbed his head up and down, the closest the creature ever came to displaying excitement. Weichs realised woefully that, before much longer, the ratman would deplete his dwindling reserves. Sighing regretfully, Weichs proffered the decanter. The grey seer did not bother to take the glass offered with it, thrusting his pale pink tongue down the neck of the bottle like a fleshy cork. Wriggling his tongue, Skilk let the fiery liquor trickle down his throat. When a quarter of the bottle had been drained, Skilk withdrew, handing it back to Weichs. The doktor fought to keep the disgust from his face. ‘No, I want you to have it, grey seer. Take it with you back to your burrow.’ Skilk stared at Weichs, suspicion glowing in his eyes, but then made the sharp chittering that passed for laughter among his kind. Weichs wasn’t stupid enough to try to poison Skilk.

  ‘Progress?’ Skilk hissed as he handed the decanter to a bodyguard. ‘Make-find potion to cure-heal?’ The grey seer looked pointedly to a huge iron cage at one end of the workshop. Its inmate was a huge, malformed thing. It could have passed for a troll. No one would imagine it had been a cooper only a few weeks before. It was the most glaring of Weichs’s failures.

  ‘Not yet, grey seer,’ Weichs admitted. ‘Great discoveries are not made overnight. There is progress, but we must not expect miracles.’ Skilk’s eyes narrowed as it digested the words. Weichs understood the skaven were just as eager to harness the healing properties of warpstone as he was, to eliminate disease and infirmity among their kind. A part of him shuddered to consider the horror of a skaven race not regularly culled by pestilence and plague. Even if he succeeded in his experiments, he might be eliminating one threat to mankind only to replace it with an even more terrible one.

  ‘Time,’ Skilk snarled. ‘Always doktor-man want-take time!’ The skaven bared his teeth, his naked tail lashing against the earthen floor. ‘Skilk tired-sick, doktor-man. Progress. Now-soon.’

  ‘I’ll need more warpstone,’ Weichs retorted as the grey seer turned to leave. ‘More test subjects, better than those with which your people have been providing me.’ Skilk continued to shuffle toward the tunnels, his bodyguards following behind him.

  ‘Doktor-man get all-much need-want,’ Skilk asserted. ‘Take-fetch more man-people, take-fetch all man-people. Progress, doktor-man. Now-soon, Skilk need-want progress.’

  Skilk’s threat lingered long after the skaven priest’s departure, like a black cloud filling the cavern. The skaven’s demands were increasingly persistent and impatient. Weichs suffered no illusions as to what his fate would be when the grey seer’s equanimity reached its fragile limits.

  Shuddering, he lifted the glass of Estalian brandy and downed its contents in one quick swallow. Somehow, the expensive spirit was less satisfying than it had been only moments ago.

  The fat form on the bed stretched his arms, a deep, throaty laugh rumbling from his immense frame as he felt strength and vigour flowing through his limbs. Only last night he was so weak that he’d been reduced to allowing a servant to feed him. Now he felt rejuvenated, restored.

  He wrinkled his nose at the pungent reek of the salve that the wizard had smeared over his body. Vile muck, but it had done the trick. He’d been too tired and weak to protest the wizard’s methods in the small hours of the morning; now he was jubilant that he had not. There was no denying that Furchtegott knew his business. Baron von Gotz swung his head around, smiling broadly as he met the gaze of his court wizard.

  ‘By Sigmar, Taal and Manann, you’ve done it!’ the baron roared. ‘I can feel the health thundering through my veins!’ He turned his eyes to the ashen faces of his doktors. The three men looked at the floor, the ceiling, anywhere that did not force them to meet that stern gaze. ‘Hex-mongers! Take your damn leeches and get the hell out of my city!’ The physicians quivered in their boots, turning their hats in their hands. Furchtegott felt triumph surge through him. These men had tried to humiliate him, now it was they who were feeling the sting of scorn.

  ‘But your excellency,’ Doktor Kleist spoke, his tone timid. ‘The city is under quarantine. We cannot leave.’

  ‘Then rot in the dungeons with the other traitorous vermin!’ the fat baron snarled. ‘You’d have had me weak as a kitten and dead within a fortnight! Science! Doktors! Bah!’ The baron waved his bloated hand, motioning for the guards scattered about his chamber to lead the physicians away and for one of them to come near.

  ‘Lord Markoff is waiting in the other room,’ von Gotz said. ‘Tell him I would see him now.’ The baron waved the soldier away, turning his attention back to Furchtegott.

  ‘You are a wizard’s wizard,’ the baron chortled. ‘A wizard among wizards! I am going to have you knighted. No, a lordship! You deserve it more than half of those simpering maggots at court!’

  ‘That is very kind, excellency,’ Furchtegott replied. The wizard’s earlier sense of victory was beginning to fade. He didn’t like the look in the baron’s eyes. They were bleary, unfocused. The boils had not receded, still visible beneath the layer of reeking salve the wizard administered a few hours earlier. There was no denying that the baron seemed healthier, but he certainly looked no better. Furchtegott decided he’d better consult Das Buch die Unholden as soon as he was able to detach himself.

  The door to the baron’s chamber opened once more, admitting the wizened figure of Wurtbad’s Lord High Justice, Igor Markoff. The magistrate wore his crimson robes of state, the golden griffin of the Ministry of Justice displayed proudly upon his breast. Markoff bowed his head respectfully to his sovereign.

  ‘I understand that you are feeling better, excellency,’ Markoff said. There was doubt in the magistrate’s voice. He could see the sickness marking the baron’s exposed chest and arms, smell the disgusting stench wafting from his body. These were not the traits of good health.

  ‘Quite well, Igor,’ von Gotz replied with a smile. He waved a hand to a trembling servant boy. The youth stepped forward, retreating as soon as the baron had removed the silver platter from his hands. Von Gotz tore into the roast squab with savage gusto, wiping grease from his jowls as he paused to continue his conversation. ‘You can help me to feel even better,’ the baron said.

  ‘Whatever I can do to serve,’ responded Markoff. Von Gotz chuckled as he heard the servile reply, but then grew serious, peering into Markoff’s eyes.

  ‘You will clear out one of the keeps. The one on Muellerstrasse would probably serve best,’ he pronounced. ‘Clear it out and then gather up every one of these plague stricken dregs you can find. Herd them there and keep them there.’ The baron smiled even as Furchtegott and Markoff opened their mouths in horror. ‘We’ll lock this sickness under one roof, contain it there. That’s how we’ll best this plague. There’ll be no one left loose to spread it.’

  It made a brutal kind of sense, but the barbaric cruelty of the baron’s plan stunned the sensibilities of those who heard him speak.

  ‘And you will do one more thing,’ he declared. ‘There is a brothel with a tavern’s name, the Hound and Hare. You will round up everyone there and remove them to the Muellerstrasse keep. Then you will burn the brothel to the ground.’ Von Gotz ground his teeth together as he imagined his revenge against the place that nearly killed him. ‘I don’t want two pieces of wood left nailed together or a single brick left intact.’ He waved his hand, dismissing the Lord High Justice.

  Furchtegott glanced nervously at the bloated figure of his patron. ‘Excellency, I must be retiring also.’ Von Gotz nodded.

  ‘Y
es, by all means.’ he laughed. ‘You’ve had a very busy morning and no doubt need your rest.’ Von Gotz waved again, dismissing his wizard. He watched as the golden robed mystic hastily withdrew through the door, hurrying back to his tower to begin his next sorcerous enterprise. As well he should, for the wizard would not find the gratitude of Baron Friedo von Gotz either lacking or transitory.

  Von Gotz’s smile faded as the buzzing of a fly disturbed his thoughts. The baron looked askance, watching with revulsion as the insect crawled across his shoulder. Drawn from its pesthole by the pungent smell of Furchtegott’s salve, the baron decided. His fat hand slapped against his shoulder with a sharp crack. Von Gotz stared at the smeared ruin of the fly staining his palm.

  Looking aside to ensure that his servants were not watching, the baron lifted his hand to his face and licked the remains of the fly from his polluted skin.

  The Temple of the Lonely Sacrament had existed since the earliest days of Wurtbad, founded by pilgrim priestesses from the great temple in Couronne. The structure was long and low, filling a broad expanse of Wurtbad’s old city district with its surrounding groves and gardens. Its outer façade was largely devoid of ornamentation, only the marble doves that topped the buttresses supporting the temple walls proclaimed the deity that was worshipped within. It was not the way of those who followed Shallya, goddess of healing and mercy, to announce their faith with garish displays and raised voices. Like the dove that was their emblem, they were quiet and content, secure in their faith. Those who had need of the goddess would find their way to her temples without expensive statues and cyclopean architecture.

  There were many in Wurtbad who had need of the goddess now. The Stir blight had ravaged entire districts, devouring entire households. The secular doktors and healers had thrown up their hands in frustration, unable to combat the sinister malady. Most now refused to even try, fearful that they themselves might fall prey to the pestilence. For those who had been abandoned to the plague, there was only one place to turn to, one place that would not turn them away.

  The halls of the temple were now filled with the sick. Wretched bodies had been crammed into every available space. An air of misery and disease hung about its interior, an aura of hopelessness utterly at odds with the white walls and alabaster floors. In times of plague, even the grace of a goddess was taxed to its limit.

  Mathias Thulmann made his way through the crowded halls, keeping his eyes fixed upon the corridor itself, blind to the sorry figures, deaf to the moans and cries that echoed through the temple. He was no healer. There was nothing he could do to help these people. He was a warrior, for that was his calling. If he could make a stand with sword and courage, he would never abandon an innocent soul. But against something as nebulous and spectral as a plague the witch hunter felt the sting of his helplessness.

  Silja Markoff and her bodyguard followed him. Thulmann was impressed by the woman’s courage in following him to this place of disease and death. He knew it must be even worse for her to prowl these halls of misery. To him, these were pitiable unfortunates. To her, they were her people.

  The high priestess of the temple was conducting services in the main chapel, a simple ceremony culminating in the release of a white dove from a small cage. The bird fluttered upwards, vanishing through the open window at the top of the chapel’s lofty ceiling. With the ritual completed, the other sisters departed to continue their ministrations to the sick. Sister Josepha nodded solemnly to the templar and his companions.

  ‘Your faith in the protection of Lord Sigmar does you credit,’ Sister Josepha told Thulmann, her old face suggesting an owl as she peered from under her white hood. ‘Or else your need is great. I was told there were questions you would ask of my supplicants.’ A hardness entered the woman’s eyes. ‘I should warn you that I will not have these people abused any further than they have been already, not even by one of Sigmar’s witch hunters. These people have begged the mercy of Shallya and such protection as her temple can provide.’

  ‘Then how do we proceed, sister?’ Thulmann asked. Sister Josepha smiled back at him.

  ‘Your Captain Meisser would have made demands, you ask questions,’ she said. ‘That impresses me perhaps more than it should, but I am all too familiar with demands of late. The aristocrats demand that we turn away the poor; the nobles demand that we turn away those with the plague. Everyone seems to want the blessing of the goddess, but no one wants to share that blessing with those who need it most.’ The priestess grew thoughtful for a moment, then looked back at Thulmann. ‘How do we proceed?’ she repeated. ‘I shall hear these questions you would ask. Then I shall decide if others can hear them.’

  Thulmann removed the garish leather mask he had been carrying in a linen sack. He held the bird-like mask upward so that Sister Josepha might see it better. The priestess nodded her head sadly.

  ‘So, these plague doktors have finally come to the attention of the Order of Sigmar,’ she mused. ‘I hoped that they would. I have heard much about them, and little of it good. They are like vultures, preying on the dying, feeding off their desperate need for hope. Shallya venerates all life, but I must confess to believing men like that have no right to live.’

  Thulmann nodded in sympathy, understanding well how she must feel.

  Suddenly, a great commotion sounded from the entrance of the temple. Thulmann could hear harsh voices barking orders above the cries and shrieks of the sick. Sister Josepha hurried to find the source of the disturbance, her recent guests following after her. Soon, they found themselves fighting their way through a press of panicked, fleeing bodies.

  The source of the disturbance was a body of soldiers dressed in the livery of the Ministry of Justice, supported by an even greater body of troops wearing the green uniform of the city guard. The soldiers were brutally herding every person they could out of the temple. Thulmann could see a large number of wagons strewn across the gardens into which the soldiers were loading the sick.

  ‘What is the meaning of this outrage?’ demanded Sister Josepha to a soldier wearing the bronze pectoral insignia of a captain. The officer forced himself to meet her withering gaze.

  ‘Order of the Lord High Justice,’ he said, pulling a sheet of parchment from his belt. ‘All those who have been infected by the Stir blight are to be taken to Otwin Keep. Those orders encompass all those within the temple.’ The high priestess staggered back, shaken by this violation of her temple’s sanctity. Mathias Thulmann stalked forward.

  ‘Surely those orders do not include the sisters?’ It was not a question but a challenge. Before the captain could respond to Thulmann’s words, they were answered by Sister Josepha.

  ‘We will go with them,’ the old priestess stated. ‘These people are supplicants of the Temple. If they are not allowed to remain here, then what grace and solace the temple can provide shall go with them.’ The captain nodded reluctantly, shouting an order to his men to allow the sisters to board any wagon that still had room. For a moment, Thulmann could see deep self-loathing in the captain. A man bound by oath and duty to execute orders he found contemptible.

  ‘I can assure you that my father will hear of this,’ Silja snarled, demanding the captain’s attention for the first time. The officer’s face turned ashen as he saw her.

  ‘Begging your pardon, ladyship, but these orders are from Lord Markoff,’ the captain repeated.

  ‘Then you may be doubly certain that he will hear of this,’ Silja hissed, pushing her way past, daring any of his soldiers to even think of stopping her.

  Thulmann followed after her. There were a great many matters unfolding in Wurtbad that he was uncertain about, but one of which he was as sure as the Ulricsberg.

  He was glad that Silja Markoff was on his side.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The witch hunter stormed through the doorway of the Wurtbad chapter house like a thing possessed. The hideous cruelty he had witnessed at the Temple of Shallya gnawed at his brain, worrying at his thoughts like a dog c
hewing on an old bone. Mingled with feelings of frustration, anger and impotence was another emotion that disgusted him more. A deep and profound guilt.

  Ruthless, merciless as the baron’s edict had been, Thulmann understood it. It was as if a battlefield chirurgeon were cutting away an infected arm from a wounded man, killing the part to save the whole. Baron von Gotz had decided to sacrifice those already infected by the plague in an attempt to save those who were not. There was no question that relocation to the chill darkness of Otwin Keep was anything but a death sentence, but, the colder, more pragmatic part of Thulmann’s mind told him the sick supplicants of the Temple were as good as dead already. But still, the decision to brush aside the lives of so many people who did nothing to warrant their destruction was one Thulmann believed he could never make. He secretly hoped there would have been enough humanity left in him to reject such a course of action.

  Thulmann canvassed the entry hall of the chapter house. All at once his distemper found something other than his guilt to direct itself toward. A dozen men dressed in black were standing about the hall, armed for battle. They cast surly looks at the pale figure slumped in a chair near the door. This bearded warrior held a loaded crossbow across his lap, beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. Streng turned his head as Thulmann entered, nodding weakly at his employer.

  ‘By all the daemons!’ Thulmann snarled. ‘What is going on here? Why aren’t you looking for the vampire’s grave?’ His eyes burned into the face of every witch hunter, causing some to look away with shame burning on their cheeks. ‘One of you shall answer me!’ he demanded.