‘Aye, we found his filthy carcass,’ the miller declared. ‘Pinned beneath a fallen support. He must have burned to death in the fire.’ The templar sighed as Mueller finished his report. The sigh slowly trailed off into the knight’s death rattle. The taverner and miller watched as the mangled body twitched for a moment and was still. Otto Keppler leaned down and pulled the heavy wool blanket which had been wrapped about the dying knight and drew it over Ditmarr’s sightless eyes.
‘We found nothing,’ the tavern keeper whispered. Mueller smiled feebly at the man.
‘If it allows him to pass the portal of Morr easier, of what harm is that?’ Mueller did not await an answer, but slowly started the long, lonely path home.
THE BLACK-CLOAKED figure rose from the shadows and limped to the corpse lying on the other side of the hedge. Carefully, a furred hand pulled the crude stone knife from the forester’s still warm body. The creature’s single eye studied the simple blade for a moment. He did not give any sign that he heard the furtive sounds of motion at his back. Slowly he rose, turning to observe the even more twisted and grotesque figures emerging from the trees.
Thyssen Krotzigk smiled as the beastmen began to circle him. The swine-headed sorcerer dropped the knife in his left hand and the blood-caked dagger in his right. He studied the malformed, animal faces, their brute eyes gleaming with hate, their fanged mouths dripping saliva as their bloodlust rose. The beastmen began to grip their crude weapons more tightly, testing their weight with practice swipes, displaying brutal strength capable of crushing skulls.
And all is the laughter of the Four Princes, thought the sorcerer, as the beastmen closed upon him.
RATTENKRIEG
Robert Earl
THE SCRATCHING HAD started again. Freda lay huddled in the darkness, cold sweat gluing her nightdress to her trembling body. In the light of the day it was a pretty thing, this nightdress. She’d chosen it because of the rabbit pattern sewn into the hem. Tonight, with the pattern hidden by darkness, it felt like a shroud.
Her knuckles were already bruised, but she carried on gnawing at them anyway, like a rat with a bone. Even when her sharp, little teeth tore through the skin and her mouth filled with the bitter, hot, copper taste of blood, she couldn’t stop.
Tonight there were more things to worry about than cuts and bruises. Horrible things.
Beneath the weight of her terror, Freda struggled to remember the words of a prayer, any prayer that might make the scratching stop. But she struggled in vain. All she could think of was the thing in the cupboard and how far away her father was.
Then the sound stopped. The pause lasted for a second, then a dozen, and then a dozen more. Freda held her breath, willing the silence to last. At length she felt the first tiny flicker of relief and took her fist out of her mouth. Slowly, with as much courage as a warrior entering a dragon’s lair, she raised her head from beneath the covers and peered towards the cupboard.
A loud impact banged against its doors.
With a shriek, Freda leapt from her bed, ran from the room and raced down the stairs. Her feet pounded on the floorboards, like a drummer sounding the retreat, the noise of her flight making her run all the faster.
‘Daddy!’ she screamed, as she fled down the short hall to his study, the rabbits on her nightdress snapping about her heels.
‘Daddy!’ She flung open the heavy wooden door and burst inside. Magretta, the house maid, sprang up from her place on Freda’s father’s knee, her cheeks burning. The old man himself also seemed a little flushed.
But Freda didn’t care if they both had the flu. She just wanted to be with her daddy. With a leap she flung herself into his arms.
‘What is it?’ he asked, his tone a kaleidoscope of embarrassment, anger and concern. ‘Nightmares?’ He stroked her hair, feeling the sweat that had turned her beautiful mane of golden hair into dank rats’ tails.
‘You’re trembling,’ he said.
‘It was the thing in the cupboard again,’ she whined, clinging to him.
He exchanged a glance with Magretta and shrugged. ‘Oh,’ her father said, and sighed. ‘Well, let’s go and have a look, then.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. It’s just your imagination.’
Taking the lantern from the table, he swung her onto his hip and carried her back upstairs. He grimaced a little at her weight. She seemed to be getting bigger by the day now, and he was no longer a young man. But Freda was oblivious to the effort the climb cost him. She stared into the shadows ahead, her expression as grim as a convict climbing the gallows.
‘Look,’ her father said, lifting the lantern to chase the shadows back behind the tumbled mess of her bed. ‘No monsters.’
‘The cupboard,’ she whispered, edging around behind him.
With a grunt, he lowered her to the floor and walked over to the twin mahogany doors. He opened them with a theatrical flourish. Inside a wall of hanging clothes hid the camphor wood rear of the cupboard, and for a moment he thought about pulling them aside and pretending to find something behind them. But, with the suspicion that such a joke might backfire and the knowledge that Magretta was waiting for him downstairs, he decided against it.
‘There, you see?’ he said. ‘Just clothes. Very pretty clothes for a very pretty girl. And perhaps some mice, but you’re too big to be scared of little mice, aren’t you?’
Freda nodded doubtfully.
‘Good girl. Now, hop into bed. I’ll leave the lamp and send Magretta up to check on you later.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because she’s, ah, busy.’
With a little sigh, Freda climbed back into her bed. At least he was leaving her the light. Daddy lent down and kissed her on the forehead, his whiskers tickling her skin, then he turned and left her, closing the door behind him as she pulled the blankets up to her chin.
The thing in the cupboard waited until he had returned to his study before it started scratching again. It was soft but insistent, like the throbbing of a rotten tooth, but this time she fought against the fear. The lamp helped. Even though Daddy had turned it down it still bathed the room in a warm light that somehow seemed to hold the noise at bay.
‘It’s just mice,’ she whispered to herself as the scratching was replaced by a series of sharp, crunching sounds.
‘Shoo!’ she said loudly. To her immense relief, the noises stopped.
‘You’re just mice,’ she told the cupboard triumphantly. She raised her head farther up out of the eiderdown, like an archer peeing over a castle wall. The sweet, glorious silence remained unbroken and a sense of triumph began to steal over her.
For a while she savoured her triumph and drifted off towards sleep. It was almost a shame that she had frightened the mice away. They were funny and sweet. And she always impressed daddy by being such a brave girl when they appeared. Not like silly Margetta who screamed and jumped onto chairs. Maybe tomorrow night she would leave out some cheese and see if…
The cupboard door swung silently open. Freda stopped breathing.
‘Daddy must have left the latch off,’ she told herself. ‘He must have.’
But before she could finish the thought, the monsters rushed out. There weren’t just one of them but two, four, a dozen. They swarmed over Freda in a single great mass, their filthy, black hair scratching her smooth skin, their jagged claws gripping her arms and legs like sprung steel rat traps. Freda, almost insane with terror, opened her mouth to scream, to vomit out this paralyzing horror, but a slimy paw thrust itself into her mouth. She gagged at the taste of the rotten skin and was choking as they bound her with thongs of rough leather.
And all the while, the lamp burned upon the table, it’s light still and even. The monsters had stirred no more breeze than they had noise. Their tails thrashed excitedly above their writhing bodies like scaly whips.
Within seconds their work was done and they left as noiselessly as they had arrived, slipping through the hole they had so painstakingly chewed th
rough the back of Freda’s cupboard.
So it was, that when Magretta came to check on her a few hours later, all that remained of the little girl was a torn scrap of her nightdress: an embroidered rabbit torn in two.
THE SHRINE WAS so old that it looked more like a thing grown than a thing built. Centuries of winter storms and harvest suns had rounded off the sharp edges of its masonry, leaving its granite bulk as smooth and featureless as a river washed boulder.
The centuries had blanketed the shrine with ivy, the greenery growing as thick as an old man’s beard. Within its rustling depths were many families of birds, the creatures living out their entire span amongst the foliage. In ages past, some of the shrine’s keepers had scoured the ivy from the walls because of them. Perhaps they had feared that those whom they were sworn to protect might be disturbed by the constant irreverence of the birdsong.
But the present incumbent had no such delusions. The dead, he knew, were dead. It would take more than a few chattering sparrows to disturb their sleep.
Besides, he liked to watch the birds flitting about the graveyard. Some of them had even grown enough trust to perch on his hunched shoulders as he worked. They’d watch with cocked heads as he chopped wood, drew water, scythed down the grass that poked up like green fingers from between the graves that huddled around the shrine.
And they did huddle, these graves, clustering around the ancient building like lambs around an ewe, nervous lambs that could smell the scent of a wolf. It was a fanciful notion, but the shrine’s keeper knew it to be an accurate one. The black depths of the forest that lay beyond his walls were alive with those who sought to enslave the dead. Kings and citadels had fallen beneath the onslaught of these abominations. Armies had been slaughtered. Great walls crumbled to dust.
Yet where they had fallen the shrine had stood, the neatly trimmed hedges that enclosed it remaining inviolate. Morr, after all, was a powerful god.
The shrine’s keeper smiled contentedly at the thought and decided that he’d worked enough for one day. He stood up, pressed his bony thumbs into the knots that had formed in his back and returned to his chamber. There he swapped his scythe for a jug of water, a crust of bread and a handful of small, wrinkled apples.
He sat on one of the gravestones as he ate and watched the sun setting over the forest. He enjoyed the sight as he munched his way through the fruit and scattered his bread to the birds that had flocked to his side. In the light of the setting sun their plumage shone and their shadows were dagger sharp. The priest found himself smiling again.
Despite the pain and the suffering, this world was a beautiful place. It was understandable that some men clung to it in defiance of their preordained span. Unforgivable, but understandable.
With a sigh, the old man glanced down at the liver spots on the back of his hands, the mottled skin there as creased as last month’s apples.
‘It won’t be long before Morr greets me,’ he told one of his fluttering friends. As if in silent confirmation, the sun dipped below the horizon and the breeze turned chilly.
As day turned to night, the priest dispersed the last of his bread and hobbled back to the shrine.
HE’D BEEN DREAMING of wide, open grassland, an ocean of green, above which clouds as big as galleys sailed lazily past. In the distance, an old limestone wall stretched across the horizon. Sun-gilded lichen covered every inch of it, except for the single oak door. As he approached, the wood started to shake with the impact of a hard knocking. The sound was as loud as thunder and as relentiess as a funeral bell. It was also absolutely terrifying.
All the same, the keeper ground his teeth together and carried on marching towards the shaking door. A second later he was stood in front of it. His fingers closed around the handle and he pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to reveal…
With a suffocated scream the old man sat bolt upright on his cot, his skin washed with sweat and his bony chest heaving as he gasped for air.
Wide eyed in the darkness of his chamber, he ran his fingertips against the rough stone of the wall. He pulled the covers back and swung his feet onto the floor. The tiles were cold, cold enough to send a welcome chill of reality through his befuddled thoughts.
With a long, shuddering breath, he shook off the last scraps of the dream and ran a trembling hand across the damp skin of his scalp.
Although the dream had gone, the knocking continued. For a moment the priest sat and listened to it, as it rattled against his door with a desperate, knuckle scraping urgency. There was a mute terror in the sound, as though the visitor was living in a nightmare of his own and for a split second the shrine’s keeper considered ignoring the summons. But he extinguished that traitorous thought as soon as it appeared. Above all things, he was a priest of Morr. It was his duty to make sure that the dying didn’t slip away unshriven, and after sixty years of service his duty was as much a part of him as his bones.
Another volley of impacts rang out. Clenching his jaw, the keeper got painfully to his feet and stumbled blindly over towards the cell’s ancient fireplace.
‘Have a second’s patience,’ he called out to his unwelcome guest as he knelt down, knees popping, in front of the fire’s charred remains. ‘I’m making light.’
The knocking paused for a moment. Then it started again with a renewed urgency.
‘Wait,’ the priest snapped, then drew in a deep breath and blew. Ash flurried up into the darkness like grey snow, revealing glowing embers beneath. ‘I’m coming.’
The priest, ignoring a sudden fit of dizziness, took another breath and blew again. This time a tiny flame burst into life amongst the fire’s remains. After the darkness of the unlit cell, the light was painfully bright and the priest wiped a tear from his eye as he fed the fire with tinder.
Only when the fireplace was once more crackling did he turn to the door. Suppressing an edgy sense of deja vu, he made himself walk over to it and lifted the bar.
He closed his fingers around the latch and pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to reveal…
Without a word of warning the door was slammed backwards in a rush of movement and cold night air. Even as the tortured hinges squeaked in protest, a huge figure, shapeless and shadowed in the flaring firelight, burst into the room. The guttering flame revealed it to be a hideous confusion of feathers, and furs and wild, staring eyes.
The shrine’s keeper moved with a speed that would have amazed his parishioners. Leaping back as easily as a man half his age, he seized the scythe from its place in the corner. Hefting its bulk upon his bony hip he turned, ready to throw his weight beneath the sweep of the blade. But before he could, the apparition swept the bedraggled mass of felt and feathers off of its head and bowed stiffly, chin to chest in the northern manner.
The priest recovered his wits quickly as he studied the man who stood before him. ‘Come in,’ he said, his voice level with a soothing calm that he’d practiced on generations of grieving relatives. ‘Take a seat.’
His guest watched him return the scythe to its corner. Beneath the filth encrusted mop of his hair and the singed remains of his beard, his face was deathly pale and hard with suspicion. Only when satisfied that the priest wasn’t going to attack him did he look away, his eyes flitting about the bare walls of the cell, as though he expected them to spring open in some trap.
‘Here, take a seat by the fire,’ the priest repeated, hastening to bar the door against the quickening wind. But when he turned around, the man was still in the centre of the room, sniffing the air suspiciously.
The priest sniffed too and immediately wished that he hadn’t. The filth that stained his guest’s rags also greased the air with a foul, sickly sweet stench. The odour had great intensity and reminded the old man of some of his riper charges.
None but a lunatic could live with such an odour, the priest decided unhappily. Then, as cautious as a man testing the heat of a stove he placed a hand on the madman’s shoulder and steered him towards a stool.
‘We�
�ll take a drink,’ he said soothingly. ‘Then you can tell me what brings you here.’
After a moment’s hesitation, the foul smelling stranger grunted his agreement and slung something from his back. At first the priest had taken it to be a beggar’s bedroll, but now he could see that it was a weapon.
At least he assumed that it was a weapon. What else could it be? The great polished lump of stained timber that served as a stock looked to belong to a crossbow, its smooth curves designed to rest easily against a man’s shoulder. On the top of this familiar shape, though, taking the place of the crossbows arms, there was nothing but a simple barrel of blue steel. As long and as thick as a man’s thigh it glinted dangerously in the firelight, its muzzle flared open in a toothless snarl.
It had a strange smell, too. An acrid, sulphur smell that was even sharp enough to cut through the rank stench of its owner.
‘Here,’ the priest said, pulling the threadbare blanket from his cot and throwing it to his guest. ‘Sit you down.’
‘Thanks,’ he muttered, his accent harsh and guttural. ‘And why not, hey? Why not be comfortable for the last few hours?’
‘Why not, indeed?’ the priest agreed, studiously ignoring the emotion in his guest’s voice. At least the man was talking.
Deciding to take the risk of turning his back on him, he went to rummage in the cell’s single cupboard, listening to the squeak of his stool beneath the stranger’s weight all the while.
‘Ha! Here it is.’ A smile eased the spare lines of the old man’s face as he produced a fat bottle of glazed clay and two pots. He poured out two generous measures, passed one across to his guest and took a seat.
‘Drink,’ he said.
Again the man grunted his thanks. He drained the cup in one deep draught, lowered it and peered into the dregs that remained. Gradually, as if in response to something he’d seen there, a glistening tear slid down a pale scar and disappeared into the bristles of his moustache.
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