Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  The warrior was now behind him, unsighted. The terribly notion seized him that something huge and sharp would plunge into his back or cleave his skull. He threw himself to the side and heard a great roar, felt the rush of air on his cheek as if it was a spring breeze.

  With great effort he leaped back onto his feet, twisted his body, arcing his sword in one great circular motion. There was a clang as the blow struck his opponent’s chest, denting his breastplate and forcing the monstrosity back a step. Glancing around, Heidel noticed the slim figure of Sassen duelling lithely with a beastman, sword flashing time and time again.

  Heidel raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead eyes. Soon it would blind him. He lashed out at the colossus as it advanced once more, and again found himself dodging the deadly axe. The witch hunter struck and struck again, and each time the same pattern repeated itself. He thrusting and slashing, his sword glancing off the black armour. The warrior heaving his great axe and plunging it into the thin air: air in which only an instant before Heidel had stood.

  Heidel had struck well, denting the armour, drawing blood from between the plates where only chainmail protected the fiend. Yet he knew he stood no chance. One blow from the axe would fell him. Then it would be over. His blows were too small, too weak. Perhaps they drew some strength from the warrior, but Heidel was tiring faster.

  Then the inevitable happened: Heidel fell backwards over a corpse. Sweat dripped down into his eyes so everything became a blur. Above him the huge black-armoured warrior stood. Behind the monster, the sun shone with a surreal beauty and the immense, ancient axe glinted cruelly. Heidel knew he was dead. There would be no escape.

  A sudden explosion, and it was like time slowed to a crawl. A massive dent appearing in the side of the warrior’s helmet. Another explosion: the dent pushed further in, and a thousand tiny holes appeared, as if someone had thrust needles repeatedly through the metal. The warrior backed away, suddenly staggering, blood and streams of yellow filth dribbling from beneath the vast helmet. The huge body fell like the edge of a cliff into the sea; foul steam and dust was thrown into the air with a gigantic crash. The dust seemed to hover in the air for a second and then was whisked away from the enormous body by a sudden gust of wind.

  Heidel sat and stared, his ears ringing, sweat dribbling into his eyes. Through the ringing came a startling voice.

  “Just in time, hey? You know, Heidel, old man, you really should pick better odds.”

  Heidel turned his head. There stood a fop: dressed in a frilled silk shirt, a floppy soft hat on top of hair curled into ringlets, a tiny perfectly trimmed moustache, and wearing soft, pointed leather boots. The man held two smoking pistols in his hands.

  “Mendelsohn,” Heidel said flatly.

  Sassen had taken care of the shell-creature and was now busy piling the bodies together. Heidel was relieved that the tracker had not been killed in the fight. He had lost track of the little man for most of it, but apparently Sassen could handle his sword after all, and though a trickle of drying blood ran down his left arm, he was not badly injured.

  “Only a scratch,” the little man had said quietly when Heidel asked about it. The tracker seemed distracted, as if something was on his mind. Heidel assumed it was the result of the combat. He had seen many men shaken after a battle; some were so distraught they were speechless, wept like children, or moaned worse than the wounded.

  They were determined to burn the foul bodies. Mendelsohn and Heidel began collecting wood and building the fire up into a pyre.

  “You must have passed me in the night,” Mendelsohn grinned. “I must say, I’m a bit upset that you only left the warrior for me.”

  “Have no fear, Mendelsohn. The Empire is crawling with corruption. You should know that, from the circles you move in,” Heidel snapped.

  Mendelsohn smiled for a reply and picked up a fallen log, swathed with damp and rotting bark. “Damn this, it’ll ruin my shirt.” He held the log away from his body but bits still fell onto the silk cuffs.

  “I’ll go and fetch the horses,” Sassen called out from the clearing. He had finished piling the bodies together as best he could and seemed anxious to be away from this place of death and corruption. Heidel nodded in agreement and the tracker disappeared off down the path.

  When they had built the fire high enough, Heidel began to throw on the corpses, cringing as he touched their diseased bodies. He was in turmoil. Mendelsohn, the aristocratic dandy, had saved his life. Had the flamboyant fop not arrived, he would now most certainly be dead. But Heidel felt humiliated, bested, and could not bring himself to show gratitude. He had known Mendelsohn some years, long enough to realise that the paths they walked were different ones. He did not entirely approve of that which the noble had taken. Begrudgingly he turned to the other man.

  “You arrived at an important time. Thank you, Mendelsohn.”

  Mendelsohn raised his head and gave him a brilliant, handsome smile. “You make it sound like we had a merchant’s meeting. ‘You arrived at an important time…’—otherwise I would never have sold the silver spoons!” A moment passed. “Oh, call me Immanuel. ‘Mendelsohn’ sounds so formal.”

  Heidel struggled for a moment with his manners, then said: “And you, you can call me Frantz… I suppose.” A moment later, “So the baron, he hired you too?”

  “The baron?”

  “Baron von Kleist? He set me upon this task.”

  “I know of no Baron von Kleist.”

  Heidel stopped for a moment, thinking. “The baron hired me to recover an heirloom, a most precious thing, that these foul beasts stole. They attacked the caravan which he was taking to Bechafen.”

  Mendelsohn looked concerned for a moment and pulled on his small moustache with his fingers. “This band attacked no caravan. I followed them from Bechafen myself, all the way. Never let them stray far from my sight the whole journey. Where is this von Kleist from?”

  “From Altdorf or somesuch. He was moving here to escape the pressures of the capital.”

  Mendelsohn pulled harder on his moustache. “I know most of the nobles in Altdorf, but I have never heard of a Baron von Kleist. What was this heirloom of which he spoke?”

  Heidel walked to the massive armoured corpse of the dark warrior. The thick metal plates which covered the body were impressive. Great strength would be needed to carry such weight. Even now the enormity of the body and the armour were frightening, as if the Warrior might suddenly leap once more into life.

  Heidel was also struck by the stench that emanated from the corpse, flies buzzed and disappeared into the cracks between the plates. He shuddered, imagining what was beneath the armour. The flies preferred what was hidden beneath the plates to the bloody mass that had been the warrior’s head.

  “A pendant, spectacular. It was around the neck of this—” Heidel began, then stopped. There was nothing: the pendant was not there. He looked up at the noble.

  “Gone?” Mendelsohn raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  Heidel nodded and turned slowly.

  “Sassen.”

  It took them half a day to find trace of Sassen’s flight. They rode two in line, Heidel sat behind Mendelsohn, clinging as lightly to the man’s back as he could. At twilight they came across Sassen’s roan, dead by the side of the path.

  “He took my grey mare,” Heidel said impassively.

  “Aye, and this poor beast looks a little grey itself.” Mendelsohn smiled brilliantly.

  Heidel could not understand this incessant cheerfulness. “Immanuel, how in this world of darkness, do you remain so—”

  “Happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not happiness, it’s…” One of his slender hands described a little circle as he thought of the right word. “It’s a sense of humour.” Heidel thought about that for a moment.

  “A sense of humour is one of the ways to fight the darkness, Frantz. If the world is a duality, caught between light and dark, day and night, good and evil, t
hen we understand humour as the opposite of… Damn, I can’t think what it’s an opposite of right now but…” Mendelsohn threw his arms in the air. “It’s a good opposite anyway.” He laughed to himself.

  “Immanuel?” Heidel said seriously.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a very strange man.”

  They rested for a while as the sun went down, ate some dried fruit, salted pork and bread, and let the horse graze. They had reached the point at which Heidel and Sassen had broken through the forest and reached the wider path. To the north lay the thin track along which they had followed the evil band. To the east the wider path continued, the way Mendelsohn had ridden. Both led to the Talabec-Bechafen road.

  “Did you follow me all the way?” Mendelsohn asked.

  “No, we cut through the forest from the north. It looks like Sassen is returning that way. Perhaps he thinks it will be quicker.”

  “Well, if we follow the wretch directly he will stay much the same distance ahead of us. If we return to Bechafen on the trail that I took, we will cover more distance but will be able to ride. It’s a risk, but it means we have a chance of cutting him off. If however, he reaches Bechafen before us, I fear we will have lost him.”

  For three days they rode and it was like a nightmare broken only when they stopped to eat or sleep at night. But sleep was hard to find. To his great irritation, Heidel would doze off only momentarily before being jolted awake. As he lay half-asleep he felt the constant motion of the horse beneath him, as if he was still riding. At other times he felt the roots and rocks digging into his back, every knot and twist. So he spent most of his time in a strange twilight world of insufferable insomnia.

  When sleep finally took him, he dreamed strange dreams: of riding the same horse as a cloaked figure. He was too afraid to talk to the man, for he knew that something was not quite right. Once, in the dream, he touched the figure on the shoulder, and the man turned. The face was for a moment caught in the shadows. But as the wan moonlight touched the face Heidel screamed: for it was a corpse, cadaverous and rotten, and curling down from its shrivelled scalp was a cascade of perfect brown ringlets. It had touched its cheeks with rouge, in a gesture monstrous and sickening, and on its face was a grin of yellow, decaying teeth.

  “Humour,” it said to him, “humour is the opposite of…” And those words echoed in frightful ways. But no matter how he tried, Heidel could not get off the horse.

  On the fourth day they reached the road, and there they bought fresh horses from a passing merchant for a thousand crowns. More, thought Heidel, than he had been offered for this task. They enquired and found that a small, weaselly man, riding a grey mare, had passed within the hour.

  They caught their first distant glimpse of Sassen as he entered Bechafen—the tracker riding slowly towards the town’s great wooden gates.

  “My poor mare,” Heidel muttered, noticing the beast’s head drooping with fatigue.

  The sun was going down behind them, the chill in the air starting to bite. They followed Sassen’s route through the gates, past the two guardsmen who looked indifferently on all those who entered the town. They trailed Sassen as inconspicuously as they could, trying to keep groups of people between them. They were fortunate that there were many on the streets: labourers heading for their favourite tavern, street vendors packing up their goods for the day, farmers driving their carts towards the gates and the hamlets surrounding Bechafen. In any case, Sassen did not check behind him; he did not seem mindful of pursuit, as far as they could tell.

  As the two witch hunters made their way through the busy streets, they kept as far behind as they could, and at times feared that they had lost the tracker. But just as they were losing heart, peering desperately into the distance, one of them would notice Sassen heading away down a side street, or just turning a corner in the distance. On and on he went, leading them across the centre of the town, and finally they entered the wealthier quarters, trotting past great rows of town houses, hidden from the road by high walls.

  Sassen entered the grounds of a decrepit and decaying building, its eaves cracked and splintered, tiles missing from its roof, a garden overgrown with weeds and grasses. The tracker tied the exhausted horse to a dying tree and disappeared around the side of the house.

  “Do we enter now, or rest and return later, refreshed?” Mendelsohn asked.

  Heidel noticed that Mendelsohn’s handsome face was weary and lined; his eyelids looked leaden, weighed down.

  “We could rest now and return later,” Heidel replied. “If we do we will be able to deal more easily with whatever evil we find. However I fear to tarry, for evil left alone can prosper and grow.” He paused wearily and squinted. “I say we enter now, and administer the cure for whatever corruption we may find.”

  Mendelsohn nodded his head emphatically. “Let us finish this business. Later we may rest.”

  They tied their horses to the front gate and walked into the front garden of the house. Mendelsohn loaded his pistols while Heidel looked around, sword drawn.

  “There must be a back way in,” Heidel whispered.

  They crept around the building, daring a peek through the side windows. The place seemed empty; no furniture cluttered the rooms, no fire warmed the air.

  The back door, peeling paint clinging to its wooden panes, swung loosely on its hinges. Beyond they could see an empty corridor leading into a shadowy room. As they entered, it occurred to Heidel that the place seemed even more decaying from the inside. The floors were covered with grime and dust, and thick, matted cobwebs hung low from the ceiling. For a moment he felt that he had entered something dead, as if he stood in the dry entrails of something that had once moved and lived. Colour had once adorned these walls; people had once laughed in these rooms and hallways.

  They searched the ground floor, and found nothing. Upwards they ventured, but all the rooms were empty.

  “It seems we must enter the cellar,” Mendelsohn ventured. “Though the prospect displeases me.”

  The stairs led down into the deepest darkness. Into the very bowels of this dead creature, thought Heidel. He pushed the idea from his mind, for it unnerved him. He was not usually quite so morbid.

  Eventually they reached the floor of a dry and empty room. A burning torch hung on the wall facing them, holding back the darkness. Heidel strode across and took it. To his left a narrow tunnel, chiselled through the rock, descended into yet deeper darkness.

  “I do not like this, Immanuel,” Heidel whispered.

  “Me neither. Yet I fear the solution to which we seek lies deeper down this tunnel. We are left with but one option. Light the way for me.” Mendelsohn walked through the tunnel opening.

  Heidel followed, holding torch in one hand, blade in the other. To himself he began to pray: “Ulric, watch over me. Sigmar, guide me.”

  The tunnel descended slowly for a hundred paces or so, then levelled out. The floors were smooth as if worn by years of use, but the narrow walls and the roof overhead were craggy. Many times Heidel or Mendelsohn clipped outcrops of rock with their shoulders, arms or knees. The air down here was feud and foul. Moisture, cold and clammy, clung to the walls and dripped down from the roof, while small puddles splashed underfoot. The two witch hunters could not see very far ahead of or behind them, and the unseen weight of the earth overhead enclosed them. Heidel was in gloomy spirits and Mendelsohn said nothing. Though remaining level, the tunnel wound now left, now right, and before long Heidel had lost all sense of the direction in which they moved. With every step the sense of utter foreboding grew in him.

  The stale odour of the still air seemed to increase with each step. With nowhere to go, no fresh air cleansing the tunnel, the smell accumulated into a gagging, noxious, stench that began to sicken Heidel. It brought to mind worms wriggling in dead meat—warming slowly in the sun. Nausea washed over the witch hunter in waves until finally he could bear it no longer and exploded into a fit of coughing.

  The noise echoed weir
dly down the tunnel. Mendelsohn jumped at the sudden break in the silence and turned. For a confused moment, Heidel’s fears leapt from his unconscious: as Mendelsohn had turned, he had imagined his face to be emaciated and cadaverous, a rotting skull, just like the face in his dreams. He gasped and his heart leapt in his chest. But as soon as he had started, he realised that it was no so. Mendelsohn was just himself.

  “What will the ladies of the court think of me now?” Mendelsohn smiled his handsome smile, trying to brush the smell from him with fluttering shakes of his hands. “I shall have to buy myself some expensive Bretonnian perfume to rid myself of this foetid odour.”

  Heidel could not help himself and broke into a shy smile. He did not mention his nightmarish vision, however, and Mendelsohn’s words did little to allay Heidel’s fears. The pair began walking again and after twenty paces or so the dread had returned. All was the same as before: the stench, the darkness, the water, the loss of a sense of direction. Then just when Heidel felt like suggesting they turn back, a dim light beckoned before them.

  Heidel and Mendelsohn crept forwards until they could peak into the chamber beyond. It was a cavern, smooth walled and dry, perhaps two hundred feet long and just as wide. The towering roof disappeared into the darkness above. It must have been a mausoleum of some sort, or perhaps a part of the Bechafen catacombs. Desiccated corpses lay on great stone slabs; bones littered the floor, jutting up at odd angles, in a veritable sea of human remains. Hundreds of narrow holes were cut into the walls, from which more bones protruded. From everything rose the stench of death and decay.

  In the middle of the room stood a stone contraption, somewhat like an arch, maybe ten feet high, beneath which stood Sassen. The little man looked up towards the top of the archway, stepped back, turned on his heels and walked out of Heidel’s sight. To the witch hunter, the tracker had never seemed so like a weasel, with his pointy, pinched little face, his furry little beard, his beady eyes squinting.