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.
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