Pain such as the young man had never known before flared through every fibre of his being. He arched his back in convulsing agony, the muscles in his body going into spasm. But somehow Dieter knew that this torturous pain was what came as a consequence of great power, and part of him thrilled at that dark realisation.
He had never felt power like it. It was at least ten times what he had felt when he succeeded in raising Leopold Hanser from the dead.
Suddenly he was experiencing another existence in another place, at another time, as well as enduring what was happening to him here and now in the sepulchral darkness of the mausoleum.
Through Drakus’ haunted memories, with the necromancer’s own eyes, Dieter saw how, with perfect irony, a man driven to prolong his own life by whatever means necessary had contracted the plague. He saw the necromancer fleeing from an angry pitchfork-waving mob. He watched—an omniscient observer—as the sorcerer came to Bögenhafen under the pall of night, how he assumed the identity of Doktor Drakus and carried out his foul research so that he might find a way to rid himself of the rapacious, flesh-wasting disease.
Dieter still wondered how he himself had avoided succumbing to the vile black pox himself. Was it because he had been marked by Morr, or had some other malevolent force marked him out as its own?
Amidst the turmoil raging like a cyclone inside his mind, realisation dawned. It was Drakus who had ultimately brought the curse of the plague upon Bögenhafen, the vermin infesting his laboratory-vault carrying the black pox to the wider world beyond the house in Apothekar Allee.
As he continued to share Drakus’ awareness, Dieter saw the necromancer performing the very same ritual he was attempting now, only this time with Anselm Fleischer instead of himself. He saw the misguided fool’s psyche collapse under the pressure, his mind not strong enough to contain Drakus’ undying spirit. He saw the ritual fail. It had cost the necromancer almost as dearly as the sanity-robbed Anselm, bringing Drakus to the verge of death. It had taken him months to recover.
Dieter felt that he himself could slip into inescapable insanity at any moment. It had become a true battle of the wills now as, with the sweat pouring off him, Dieter physically strained to force the necromancer out of his mind.
Now Dieter was back in Doktor Drakus’ cellar, only he was not watching the scene through his own omniscient eyes but through those of the necromancer. He saw his own unconscious form lying on the floor of the crypt. He saw a petrified Erich prostrate himself before the Corpse Taker, begging his mercy, promising to do anything if the necromancer would only spare his life. He heard the necromancer and the apprentice make their unholy bargain—Erich’s life in return for Dieter’s soul—and witnessed them seal the pact with Erich’s blood.
Erich had been Drakus’ pawn ever since, manipulating Dieter in the cruellest way imaginable. Dieter was able to fill in the rest himself: Erich carrying him back to their lodgings in Dunst Strasse, observing his progress after the change Drakus had forced in him, encouraging him to develop his necromantic abilities and strengthen his mind, Dieter’s friend becoming his betrayer, unknown to the impressionable country boy, acting as Drakus’ spy, judging when Dieter had honed his talents enough and become a suitable vessel into which Drakus might transfer his malevolent soul.
It had not been Dieter who had driven Erich mad at all. It had been the older youth’s bond with the Corpse Taker that had caused him to steadily lose his grasp on reality. This bitter insight brought Dieter back to the present with a jolting shock.
He knew that he was going to die. For the briefest of moments he wondered whether he should let Drakus finish him, rather than let the black sorcery he had turned his back on use him again for its own foul purpose. It was nothing less than he deserved.
But then the tiny part of Dieter’s mind that was still his, and that was still rational, realised the awful consequence of such an action. If Drakus succeeded in what he was trying to do—if Dieter simply gave into him—the Corpse Taker would live on in a renewed body and with renewed vigour, able to see the fulfilment of his evil schemes, whatever they might be.
The necromancer had to be confident that his plans would come to fruition on this night, for having been so careful to keep himself hidden for so long, Drakus had taken a great risk by killing the town’s sextons and Father Hulbert. He was obviously not intending to remain in Bögenhafen much longer, not unless he had something even more shockingly atrocious in mind. After all, in the wake of the plague there had been a huge increase in the number of fresh corpses buried within the environs of Bögenhafen: a veritable army. The army Dieter had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares. Dieter had no choice but to fight the necromancer. And besides, he wasn’t ready to let death take him just yet, as it had taken every last member of his family.
Fighting back the pain, Dieter inhaled deeply, feeling talons pressing against his skull, feeling the necromancer’s dark intelligence crushing his psyche, as if Drakus was squeezing his very soul from him. As the mildewed air of the mausoleum filled his lungs, Dieter focused on the horrific unreal sensations overwhelming his senses.
His mother lying cold in her grave. Rats burrowing whiskered noses into the soft parts of his body, elongated incisors biting and tearing. The ring of a whetstone on an executioner’s axe. Blighted crops. The abattoir-stink of the slaughterhouse. The highwaymen butchering the coach driver and his passengers. A platter of furred rotten fruit, turning to black sludge in the fusty heat of summer, thick with flies. The acrid taste of soured milk. Hordes of zombies bearing the marks of the plague, and the faces of the people of Bögenhafen, marching to make war against the living; their leprous bodies blotched with rot and riven with maggots.
With the last shreds of his conscious mind, Dieter distilled the sights, smells and sounds back into the eldritch, ethereal matter out of which they had originally grown, watching them melt and dissolve into an inky morass as he drew the dark power from the essence of death itself congealing within the crypt, focusing them into a single point, into one thought: that he wanted to live.
And that one simple desire took form.
A bolt of dark energy blasted out of Dieter, exploding from him in a catastrophic shockwave of lethal power. It slammed into Drakus and his moribund manservant, hurling them backwards. Erich stumbled and fell to the floor of the crypt, as the chamber shook. There was a sharp crack as he hit his head on the flagstones and was knocked senseless. The echoes of the chanted mantra died, swallowed up by the cloying air.
The unnatural mental connection was broken. Dieter felt numb with cold and yet at the same time every nerve ending in his body was on fire.
The eldritch wind rose to become a screaming gale that tore through the crypt, tugging at the grave-clothes of the skeletons in their niches and swirling the sorcerer’s robes around him as the necromancer got to his feet.
“Such power!” Drakus gasped, tasting Dieter’s aura. “I can see it blazing like black fire in the orbs of your eyes. But it is not enough to stop me!” he roared with malice burning in his own cataract-clouded eyes.
Dieter strained against the ropes holding him. He focused his mind on the bindings, seeing the hemp rotting away over time. The rope dissolved and Dieter rolled off the sarcophagus, landing on his hands and knees on the flagstoned floor. His kneecaps and wrists jarred painfully but it was nothing compared to the agony flaring along every nerve in his body as the dark energy surged through him in an uncontrollable torrent, like a howling gale.
He struggled to his feet, using the sarcophagus for support. He breathed in deeply, gulping in stale air as he felt a twinge in his chest. Had he cracked a rib? Or was it another side-effect of drawing on the esoteric energies of the dead?
Dieter heard a shout, a barked command. Drakus was holding his hands to his shrivelled skull.
Figures that had been standing propped against the walls of the crypt, as motionless as marionettes waiting for the puppet master’s will to give them life, lurched towards Dieter
as Drakus’ flesh-puppets jerked into stilted life.
Father Hulbert’s corpse thrashed against the wall where it hung, twisting spastically from the iron manacles, the rope of its intestines slapping wetly against the floor as it spasmed.
The zombies advanced on Dieter with slow yet relentless steps. The two body snatchers, their septic faces spoiled by rot, were closing on him from behind. Their hulking forms blocked his escape route up the steps out of the crypt. And the charred-flesh form of Leopold Hanser was bearing down on him from the other side. The smell of overcooked meat hung heavy about Leopold’s carcass.
Dieter recoiled again before the mindless monster he had created. Looking into that slack-jawed, fire-blistered face was like staring into the face of his own mortality.
To his right were the obstructions of the sarcophagi, to his left the burial alcoves of the ancient dead. He was trapped, and he was going to die. There would be no salvation for him now.
Dieter gazed in horror into the dead eyes of the zombies. It was said that the eyes were the windows to the soul. The zombies’ glassy stares told him that there were no souls left inside the macabre shells of their reanimated bodies.
Oppressive shadows closed in on Dieter once more.
He inhaled again, ignoring the pain in his chest this time, welcoming the approaching dark. And now it seemed to Dieter’s mage-altered sight that rivulets of glistening darkness were running like fluid obsidian across the floor of the crypt to pool at his feet, before being absorbed into his body as he began to shape his own spell.
Drakus’ ritual of awakening, all those months ago, had roused a monster lurking inside him, a sinister latent force that had lain dormant throughout his life until he had reached adulthood and fate had brought him to Bögenhafen. But where had that power come from? Had it been because of his upbringing? Had it been due to veneration of Morr and all things funereal?
From an early age Dieter had been exposed to death in its various forms, archaic funeral rites, and the dwelling places of the dead. He had been left traumatised as a child by his mother’s death. As he entered adulthood he had been drawn to death. He had sought a profession that dealt with death, or at least supposedly its prevention, on a daily basis.
He had tried to deny his heritage; he had tried to become a physician, a healer of the sick, but fate, or nature, had determined that he should become a killer, a dealer in death. From the very beginning, his upbringing and life experiences had prepared him for this moment, had prepared him to take on the mantle of the necromancer. He had fought his inherent dark nature and had lost.
Dieter did not know where the enchantment came from, but it came nonetheless. He could hear the drumming of rib bones on stretched skin. The drumming grew louder until his head throbbed as though the bone-beaters were hammering on his eardrums. He felt the cold wind of Shyish, blowing right through him as if he were no more corporeal than a ghost, drawn to this place of necromancy and death.
And Dieter understood why it was so easy to raise the dead in this place. The power had always been here, residing within the mortuary crypt, a source of great and terrible power waiting be tapped. That was why he had been able to resurrect Leopold in the warehouse. By killing his friend there Dieter had consecrated the place by the act to the forces of death, and encouraged the darkest winds of sorcery to blow there more readily.
Dieter didn’t need his notebooks or hours of preparation, to work his spells in the mausoleum either. Drakus was drawing the power of death from this place and Dieter was able to use it just as well. But there was no doubt as to which was the more powerful will at work here. Dieter could still feel the Corpse Taker’s malignant presence lingering at the edge of his conscious self. There was no time to waste. Dieter had to act fast whilst Drakus was still reeling from the shock of his initial assault.
The dark apprentice cast his spell.
Blood, hot and sticky, gushed from Dieter’s nose as the dark power gathering behind his eyes was released in a second conjuration. The bitter black bile taste filled his mouth and he doubled up, beset by agonising, stabbing gastric pains. But his suffering mattered not: the spell had worked.
Coils of palpable darkness extruded from Dieter’s fingertips—drawn from the hurricane of eldritch power raging within the mausoleum—and wound through the shimmering air into the wall alcoves. The black mist wrapped itself around the bones lying there, shrouding them in a cloak of writhing shadows that pulled the bones together, creating bonds of darkness where in life there had been knotty strings of sinew and ligaments. In a hollow clatter of rattling bones, three skeletons pulled themselves free of their stone shelves, dragging threads of cobwebs with them.
Amidst the pain, Dieter felt a certain grim satisfaction that he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had raised the dead.
The skeletons moved with jerking insect-like movements towards Drakus’ shambling undead. The zombies, in response, turned on the bone mannequins, groaning hungrily. A fist like a lump hammer smashed into the ribcage of a skeleton, shattering its sternum, as chattering teeth sank into the meat of the sexton’s arm. A hand that was made of nothing but bare bone clawed the face of the other dead gravedigger, tearing open a cheek, so that the zombie’s own champing teeth could be seen. The last of the skeletons leapt on Leopold’s corpse, tearing at the crackling of its blackened hide, its jaws closing around the flesh-puppet’s head.
Dieter’s vision was beginning to grey at its periphery. He felt utterly exhausted. Maintaining the sheer physicality of the skeletons was taking an extreme toll on his body. He could feel the strain in every muscle, every sinew, every nerve flaring with pain. He had nothing more to give.
A spear of dark energy slammed into a skeleton, sending it hurtling across the chamber to shatter against the far wall. The same fate befell a second and then the third was obliterated in an explosion of bone.
Doktor Drakus had recovered and his wrath was terrible indeed. But he wasn’t going to rush his revenge. He was going to savour every moment he spent punishing Dieter for his audacity.
Through a combination of luck, will power and sheer terror Dieter had managed to raise the dead in order to defend himself. Yet he lacked the power, and more importantly the control, that one so well practiced in the Black Arts as Drakus possessed. And the Corpse Taker was showing him who was still the true master here. Now it was time for Dieter to die.
The apprentice was aware of the insistent buzzing again, a sound like rusted metal teeth sawing bone.
The bolt of pure, concentrated malevolence hit him squarely between the eyes and sent him sliding across the floor. Dieter was gripped by a violent seizure, which crippled him as a series of thrashing paroxysms convulsed his body. Foamy saliva spurted from between clenched teeth.
It was as if the veil of mortality had been torn down from before his eyes.
Dieter Heydrich stared in heart-stopping horror into the oblivion of the void. And it recognised him as its own.
He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves somewhere outside, the shouts of men and then the sound of booted feet running down the stone steps into the tomb. The shouts grew louder. Drakus spat something in the unholy tongue of the lords of undeath. There was the clash of steel upon stone, the wet thunk of blades meeting flesh and a god-fearing oath.
Dieter opened tear-blurred eyes and looked upon the mortal world of shadows again in time to see Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger confront the Corpse Taker’s undead.
The bastard received my letter then, he thought.
Sigmar alone knew how the templars had tracked Drakus to this place and at this time. Then again, a garden of Morr would be the first place a witch hunter would look for a necromancer.
“In the name of Sigmar, I renounce you!” Krieger bellowed, laying a blow against a re-formed skeleton that was now fighting for the black-hearted necromancer. “I smite your evil in the name of the holy Heldenhammer!”
The skeleton fell, its backbone severed.
Krieger’s two lieutenants were grappling with the hulking gravedigger’s zombie and that of Leopold Hanser.
Dieter rolled over onto his side and tried to stand. He was suddenly horribly aware that he had soiled himself.
Shrieking, the necromancer’s manservant ran at the witch hunter captain, hands become talons raised before him. Dieter saw Krieger’s blade, blazing with the holy golden light of Sigmar himself, open the retainer’s body across the middle. A torrent of maggots, grubs and many-legged crawling things cascaded out of the dry husk of a man. The withered leathery remains of the manservant shrank to the ground like a deflating pig’s bladder as beetles, centipedes and mealworms wriggled free of it, escaping into the cracks between the flagstones.
Dieter was now on his knees. The exit from the mausoleum lay before him, unobstructed.
A strong arm clamped down on his shoulder and Dieter looked up to into the furious fear-enlarged eyes of one of Krieger’s burly lieutenants, as the man raised his sword ready to impale Dieter’s corrupted heart on the tip of his sword. The man obviously took him to be one of the necromancer’s servants.
Then, just as abruptly, the witch hunter was hauled from Dieter’s view as a hulking mass of decomposing hunger and fury yanked the witch hunter off his feet and into the shadows with a sharply cut-off cry. Dieter scrambled to his feet and staggered up the stairs out of the tomb, into the cold Kaldezeit night.
He stumbled onto his knees on the gravel path outside the tomb-structure, retching violently. His head span with a nauseous migraine. Lights flashed like miniature lightning strikes before his eyes. The clamour of battle echoed up from the subterranean burial chamber behind him.
Necromancer Page 21
