Necromancer

by Jonathan Green - (ebook by Undead)

  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 hav
ing 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.