Necromancer

by Jonathan Green - (ebook by Undead)

  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 o
r 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.