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 in
to 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.
Necromancer Page 18
