Hoffenbach watched and waited, the rain pattering on the brim of his lobster-tail helm.
One of the party, whom the roadwarden was almost certain was the village blacksmith, took hold of the shire horse’s reins and put a calming hand on the beast’s muzzle, as the other conspirators manhandled their captive onto his back. Was the man dead or merely unconscious? Hoffenbach had no way of knowing. What did intrigue him was that the conspirators were securing the stranger’s gnarled staff to the horse’s saddle along with a scabbarded sword, which the roadwarden supposed must also belong to the comatose man.
If he acted now he could stop them, he considered, but if he did so he knew that he wouldn’t get to the bottom of what was going on here, and might also pass up an opportunity to discover what had happened to the witch hunter Scheitz. Hoffenbach knew the slovenly innkeeper had been lying when he said that he hadn’t seen the witch hunter, but just how much did he know? From his involvement in tonight’s proceedings, the roadwarden guessed it was a great deal.
No, Hoffenbach decided, feeling the reassuring weight of his warhammer as he hefted it in his hands, he would hold back and see where the Viehdorfers were taking the red-robed stranger. He had seen his type before too, working as part of an Imperial commission, as he was. Practitioners of the Arts Magicae. Spell-casters. Wizards.
As the men led the horse and its burden away from the Slaughtered Calf and off the road along the winding paths of the forest, the roadwarden followed, keeping his distance, unseen. Once the party entered the forest, with the eerily glowing disc of the moon broken by the rain-lashed canopy above them, moved away from the ambient light of the inn, they opened the shutters of the lantern they were carrying and the way through the woods was illuminated by a circle of yellow light.
The ground rose as they travelled south, putting several miles between themselves and the inn. The going was slow as the blacksmith carefully guided his horse over jutting stones and swollen root boles that infringed on the narrow path that they were following. The men were taking care not to slip in the quagmire that the gradually easing rain had made of the ground.
The further they travelled into the tangled forest the quieter the dark woods became, the tree trunks more twisted, the undergrowth more thorny and wild, the path less well defined. Hoffenbach felt uneasy. To him, this was the kind of place that the foul-brood beastmen would call home.
Then, at the top of a craggy hill, they broke through into a clearing. Hoffenbach ducked down behind the stump of a lightning-felled beech, and from his hiding place saw before him something that made the rest of the forest seem like a pleasant arboreal idyll.
The tree was huge, surely larger than any other tree he had seen in the forest; its thick trunk twisting upward and splitting into a mass of warped and misshapen, leafless branches. The top of the tree seemed to point an accusing finger at the cloud-shrouded night’s sky, as if in defiance of the gods themselves. Hoffenbach was not able to discern what species the tree must once have been. Its sheer size suggested an oak to him, but the nature of its rough bark, grey and granite-like in the light of the moon that was cast down into the glade between the towering trees, seemed more like that of an ash. Its warped nature was unlike any creation of nature Hoffenbach knew. Perhaps this tree was no creation of nature.
It was not just the writhing form of the tree that lent this place such an all-pervading horror. It was also the bodies, in various states of decay, hanging from its branches. Some were barely more than lichen-flecked skeletons, loosely held together by fibrous ligaments; others mere bones, dangling from moss eaten lengths of hempen rope. Others amongst the tree’s grisly trophies were fresher corpses, still clad in the clothes or armour they had worn in life, their flesh grey and greening, heads lolling, eyes plucked clean from their sockets, mouths fixed in rictus grins of death.
There were the bodies of all manner of people hanging here, the cadavers swaying in the wind that wound down through the glade to caress the hanging tree. There were still more rotten strands of rope left trailing forlornly from the higher branches, their bodies having fallen, now lying amongst the mouldering leaf litter that covered the putrid soil of this place. Hoffenbach could see a ribcage here, a shattered skull there.
It was then that he saw, half-buried in the mud and mulch, the red-patina links of the great chains. Each one was secured to the macabre trunk at one end—looped around its great girth or hooked over iron pegs that had been hammered deep into the wood—and at the other to one of a number of boulders that were half-sunken in the earth around the perimeter of the glade. Hoffenbach couldn’t begin to imagine why.
A gust of wind carried the vile scents of decomposition to him. He could taste it now on his tongue and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as his unease increased. The rain that had become a gentle patter on the leaves above his head finally ceased. The hanging tree didn’t so much seem to grow as to thrust its way out of the putrid earth. The air of the clearing was heavy with the smell of leaf-mould, wet clay and putrefaction—the smell of corruption.
It was only then that he realised that one of the hanging corpses was that of his erstwhile partner, Schweitz.
The witch hunter’s body swung slowly like a macabre pendulum, his head tilted to one side at an unnatural angle, his cape torn into tatters, his eye sockets black, bloody holes. Hoffenbach could see that the tips of several branches were buried inside the witch hunter’s dead body, as if they had been forced into the corpse for some reason. It almost looked, in fact, as if they had grown that way. What ghoulish practices were taking place here? Perhaps the villagers didn’t just hang their victims.
The only half-sane conclusion Hoffenbach could draw, from what he saw here, was that the villagers offered the tree sacrifice in the perversely misguided belief that it somehow protected Viehdorf with its malign influence—the rotting flesh of the corpses feeding the tree’s hungry roots. Indeed, on his travels throughout the Emperor’s realm, he had heard half-told tales of such barbaric practices before.
Still hidden behind the broken stump, Hoffenbach continued to watch, but still he did not rush to act. If there was anything that his career as a roadwarden on the highways of His Imperial Majesty had taught him, it was patience. He would watch and wait for his moment.
The bushy bearded forester, his axe tucked into his belt at his side, took a noosed rope from a saddlebag and threw half of its coiled length over one of the lower branches of the ghoulish tree.
Hoffenbach continued to watch as the noose was pushed roughly over the unconscious prisoner’s head.
Abruptly the man began to stir, shaking his head to clear it of sleep and clutching clumsily at the blacksmith who was trying to pull the noose tight around his neck. Then, when he began to understand the mortal danger he was in, the man started to struggle more violently, arching his back; punching and kicking at his captors to free himself from their grasp.
Now was Hoffenbach’s moment. Raising his hammer above his head, he charged into the clearing, leaf mould squelching and brittle bones cracking beneath his pounding footfalls.
Gerhart’s eyes bulged open as he felt a rope tighten around his neck. Reacting on instinct, he kicked out as he tried to free himself from the rough hands he could feel holding him down. He heard a man grunt in pain, felt the hands let go and then had the wind half-knocked out of him as he fell onto the wet ground, landing with a jarring smack on his right shoulder. As consciousness returned to him he became half-aware of men shouting, one as if charging into battle, others in an angry and confused clamour. The wizard managed to get both hands on the knot around his neck and strained at it to loosen the noose and free himself.
Coughing and gasping for breath, he rose onto his knees and pulled the noose free. Well, that was a first. People had tried to drown him, fry him to a crisp and shoot him, but no one had ever tried to hang him before.
A combination of wan moonlight and the orange, flickering glow of a lantern on the ground nearby show
ed him that he was in a forest clearing. The shadow of a huge, twisting tree loomed over him, even darker shapes hanging from its branches. He heard an angry whinny and realised that, as well as men, there was a horse here. He could smell its animal-sweat stink. There was a man lying on his back in the mud and leaves not three feet away. That must have been the man he had kicked.
How dare they? His temper blazed that these impudent peasants would try to do away with him, a battle wizard of the noble Bright Order of the Colleges of Magic!
The fire wizard scrambled to his feet. Leaves and thorny twigs clung to the hem of his muddied robes. The other man was also back-up on his feet and Gerhart saw that it was the man from the inn whom he had taken to be the village blacksmith. The blacksmith was slipping on the wet ground lunging for something the large shire horse was carrying. With a ringing of steel the blacksmith drew what Gerhart realised was his own sword from the scabbard that had been tied to the horse’s saddlebag, along with his staff.
With an angry shout, the blacksmith threw himself at the wizard. Gerhart barely managed to twist out of the way of the enraged man’s charge. The tip of his sword landed with a wet thunk where, only a moment before, Gerhart’s leg had been, slicing into the knotty tissue of an exposed root. Out of the corner of his eye, Gerhart thought that he saw the root retracted at the blow, as a wounded animal might withdraw its paw from a closing trap.
The blacksmith might be skilled with his hammer and anvil but he was no swordsman. Evading another uncoordinated swing, Gerhart stumbled over to the horse and tugged his staff free of the saddlebag. The blacksmith’s next lunge was parried by the gnarled wood.
The wizard saw that the roadwarden was already trading blows with the forester, warhammer against axe, whilst the fat, nervous innkeeper was holding back from the fight.
Then there was the last of the men in the lynch mob—the gaunt, sorrowful individual Gerhart had seen drinking by himself—running at him, nock-bladed dagger drawn, wailing like a rabid animal, as if all human reason had left him.
The fire mage swung at the desperate man with his staff but his movements were still clumsy and uncoordinated, even though adrenalin was now rushing though his veins, purging drugged sleep from his body. He clipped the man’s arm with the charcoaled end of his staff, but not hard enough to disarm him. The return blow with the other end, however, cracked the sad-eyed man across the chin and he dropped to his knees, blood pouring from his mouth.
Gerhart reeled, his head spinning, as the blacksmith came at him again, his teeth bared in an expression of angry defiance. Gerhart staggered backwards and collided with the snorting shire horse, which whinnied again and broke away, cantering towards the edge of the clearing.
The wizard’s sword, still in the blacksmith’s hands, connected with his staff, the blow sending jarring pain up Gerhart’s arms through his wrists. If the staff had not been toughened by years of fire-tempering and absorption of raw magical energy, the blow would probably have splintered it.
Gerhart knew it was unlikely he would be able to hold off the brute strength of the blacksmith, even if he was an unskilled swordsman. He would need to draw on the other resources he had at his disposal to bring about an end to this battle.
He quickly tried to put some distance between himself and the blacksmith as possible and then closed his eyes on the chaos surrounding him. A spark flared in the darkness of his mind. Gerhart opened his eyes again but looked now with his eldritch mage-sight.
The winds of magic whirled and twisted through the clearing, visible to Gerhart as tormented currents and spinning eddies, bright coruscating ribbons of power. Black shadow-trails were drawn to the tree. Emerald tongues of flame slithered across the forest floor. Slanting, aquamarine bars of sorcerous radiance danced in the sky above the forest, like the fabled Northland aurora. Then he saw what he had been seeking. Hovering in the air over a forgotten lantern, left on the ground by one of the lynch mob, a nimbus of red and orange light, flickering like a candle-flame.
He drew the burnished glow to him, inhaling deeply as he did so, letting the esoteric energies into every fibre of his being, feeling them warming him to the core, as if they were healing his injuries, replenishing his strength. Years of experience fighting upon battlefields across the length and breadth of the Empire helped him focus now. Inside his mind a flame burned, bright and intense, growing in strength as Gerhart’s anger fed its ferocity, and a spell took shape there.
At the edge of his field of vision, Gerhart saw the axe wielding forester fall as the roadwarden parried the slicing arc described by the axe blade and brought his own weapon around to connect with the side of his opponent’s head with skull-cracking force.
Then the spell was ready and the wizard could contain its power no longer.
In an instant the lurching blacksmith was alight, his whole body, clothes and hair ablaze as if the source of the fire came from inside him. The man faltered in his run, but then stumbled onward, the fire consuming him, dropping Gerhart’s sword. A piercing scream rose from the flailing human torch.
Gerhart was aware of other cries of panic.
Seeing what the wizard had done to the boldest of their companions, through the crackling flames curling from the burning blacksmith, Gerhart saw the innkeeper now mounted on the shire horse, having somehow managed to haul his bulk onto its back, kicking his heels into its ribs as the mournful man, struggled to climb on behind him. He could hear a pathetic whimpering accompanying their flight. With a whinny, the horse galloped off into the forest, its hoofs beating a tattoo—like distant thunder on the ground that was swallowed up by the trees.
The blacksmith took two more clumsy steps and then collapsed, his cries silenced. The only sound now was the wailing whine, fizz and pop of the intense fire consuming his body.
Gerhart felt drained. Exhausted, the fire mage slumped to his knees on the leaf-churned ground. He slowly became aware of the roadwarden’s cautious approach and looked up through weary eyes at the man standing over him, hammer still in hand. The black silhouette of the hanging tree rose up behind Hoffenbach, a sinister, warped perversion of nature, its branches—almost more like rough-skinned tentacles than tree limbs—clawed at the stratus-crossed sky. Blood ran from underneath the iron brim of the roadwarden’s helmet.
If it hadn’t been for the roadwarden’s intervention it was quite likely that Gerhart’s body would have joined those other crow-picked carcasses hanging like vile death-trophies from the possessive clutches of the tree. Now the warden was looking at the wizard in shocked surprise—perhaps even horror having witnessed the spontaneous combustion of the blacksmith. He had risked his own life to save Gerhart from being sacrificed to the tree. Hoffenbach’s expression mirrored how his feelings were vying with each other, as he tried to reconcile saving the sorcerer’s life with the devastating powers he had seen unleashed. Was it wise to let such a dangerous wizard live?
Gerhart Brennend had seen that expression before. The roadwarden was just as suspicious of wizards as the next superstitious peasant.
Black tentacle-shadows writhed with unnatural life in the darkness. Hoffenbach opened his mouth to speak but the only sound that came from his throat was a gargling death rattle. There was a wet ripping sound and Gerhart felt a warm, cloying wetness splash his face. His nostrils were suddenly heavy with the hot smell of iron. Blood. It was only then that the wizard saw the broken end of a tree-limb protruding from the man’s neck above the top of his hauberk.
Gerhart watched in horror, transfixed, as other branches seized the road-warden’s arms, body and legs, wrapping themselves fluidly, disgustingly around the man with a creaking like a yew bow being pulled taut. Cold realisation leeched the resolve from him to replace it with a numbing chill as he barely dared to believe what he was witnessing. Denied its sacrifice, the hanging tree itself had come to chaotic life. The tree effortlessly lifted the choking roadwarden into the air and then, in one violent eruption tore the wretched man limb from limb. Pieces of
Hoffenbach dropped to the ground, offal left dangling from the writhing branches. Then the tree reached for the wizard.
Gerhart recovered himself immediately, the dire urgency of his predicament filling him with renewed resolve. His sword lay close to the still smouldering body of his foolish attacker. Reacting almost instinctively, Gerhart rolled away from the clutching grasp of the branches, stretched out his right arm and snatched up his soot-smeared blade. The pommel was still warm to the touch.
The tree lashed out at Gerhart again, only this time he was able to fend off its attack, blocking strikes from its lower branches with his sword. Where his blade struck the tree, thick dark sap oozed from its wounds like blood.
The branches recoiled from the wizard’s wounding blows, giving Gerhart the opportunity to get to his feet once more. He backed away out of its reach. It seemed to the mage that the creaking and groaning of the wood, as it contorted itself into all manner of writhing shapes, was the tree growling at him.
The hanging tree was not done with him yet. With a clanking of protesting rusted metal links, the tree uprooted itself, pulled great splayed roots, dripping earth, from the grave-soil ground of the clearing and began to drag its massive bulk towards him. The boulders secured to the taut chains also came free of the orange flecked mud as the tree heaved the great rocks attached to it across the clearing, gouging great ruts in the putrid loam.
Gerhart had faced all manner of horrors before—slithering Chaos-created spawn-things, a living daemon-cannon, creatures born of nightmares that by rights should never have existed in the waking world—but nothing so primal, so ancient and so terrifying as this hanging tree before. He could feel the malign influence of the Chaos energies fuelling the tree’s unnatural vigour all around him. He could feel it thickening the air, feel it raising the hackles on the back of his neck, chilling his spine, freezing the marrow in his bones, taste its bitter gall in his mouth. He even felt its cold, corrupting touch in the dark depths of his very soul.
Tales of the Old World Page 82
