Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  “Where will you go?” his mother demanded, trying to fight back her tears. Karel paused and caressed her tired, worn hand.

  “I am going to go down to Marienburg,” Karel declared, looking away from his mother for fear that tears would well up in his own eyes. “I shall go to the temple of the sea god, see if the priesthood of Manann will have me for one of their own. See if they will allow me to atone for the crimes of my fathers, and my home.”

  Karel kissed her again, and stepped out into the narrow lane that wended its way through what was left of Wulfhafen.

  Perhaps the village would fade away now. Perhaps it would somehow rebuild and endure. Perhaps it would even return to its evil ways. For Karel, it did not matter. He had found the answer to the questions he had asked his father. The beast had not been a daemon, but could it truly be said that it had not been sent by the gods? Had the terrible doom that visited the village not been brought about by their own avarice and greed? Karel could not lead any of his family or neighbours to atone for their misdeeds, for each man was steward of his own soul.

  So, the last son of Wulfhafen strode away into the morning light, taking the first steps on the long road of his penance.

  HATRED

  Ben Chessell

  I am hatred. I am revulsion. If you know me and do not hate me, you are evil. I have enough hate for myself.

  The gibbet in Kurtbad was unoccupied. Swinging in the gentle breeze, the empty loop of rope regarded the village like a macabre eye. The people of Kurtbad slept, though they had gone to bed afraid. The two guards posted outside the barn which served as meeting hall slumped against the wooden door, blankets wrapped around them like shrouds. Their pitchforks lay discarded on the black Averland soil. If the humble wind which shook the noose had been so bold as to sniff the breath of these men, it would have smelt wine, much wine.

  The midnight watch in the midst of an Averland witch hunt was not a duty to face unfortified. The small stocks of wine, kept in Kurtbad for Taal’s Day of Spring-return, had been cracked open and distributed to all the villagers. When that day came, and it would be soon, everyone but the children would understand.

  Now all that mattered was that a man had been killed.

  Gunter pulled his woollen cloak tighter about his shoulders and made enough noise to wake the form in the bed he had recently left—but got no response. The thin moonlight didn’t help Gunter see whether she really was asleep. He buckled on his sword, his since his father had died on a frosty night early in the winter, and drew back the bolt on the door of the house which had come to him the same way. Ice on the stone step cracked under his militiaman’s boots and the breeze blew away the last cobwebs of sleep. Gunter found much solace in his duty, the sole permanent militiaman in the village of Kurtbad, responsible for more than a hundred men, women and children. He straightened his back and headed for the barn to see how his new recruits were doing.

  Anja waited for the door to close behind him before sitting up and lighting the candle from the last coals which winked like dying stars in the ashen sky of the hearth. She returned to bed via the door, where she drew the bolt again. Gunter’s side of the bed was warm but cooling quickly. She crawled back to the corner where she had curled like a cat on the night when Gunter fetched her from her family, telling her mother that she would be safer with him. It was probably even true. How could her mother, older now than most women in the village, tell the militiaman, tall as a bear, he could not take her only daughter. It was for Anja’s protection, after all.

  Anja and Gunter were not married, and had he not been arguably the most important man in Kurtbad, action would have been taken. As it was, many people in the village muttered after she passed by and looked at her as if to see some sign of her sin worn openly on her garments.

  Anja curled up and thought about these things, looking at the candle flame and how the beeswax melted and ran down the stem like tears. The candle cried itself to death.

  Outside the village, on the road to Nuln, the night was shredded by a startled cry and a flash of blades. A man leapt from the back of a horse and stumbled in the mud at the side of the road. Another man rolled on the ground, the winter leaves sticking to his face, his wrist in his mouth. The struggle was as bloody and quick as a dogfight. When it was over, the inadequate moon lit only naked skin and cooling blood.

  The victor of the battle rode through the forest toward Kurtbad, searching for something.

  Otto the butcher slept well that night, despite a nagging feeling of guilt. He was used to that.

  Kurtbad nestled on the edge of the Reiksbanks Forest in central Averland, four days’ ride from Nuln. It sat beside an old trading route which led from that great city of commerce and industry to a dwarf outpost at Hammergrim Pass in the Black Mountains. There, for centuries, the dwarfs had sucked lead and iron from the guts of the fat mountains. The orc was loaded onto oxen carts and passed through Kurtbad on its way to the markets at Nuln, and thence by river to whatever Empire foundry was prepared to pay the best price: gold for steel. Kurtbad had seen some business in those days.

  The greed of the dwarfs eventually exceeded their skill and the bounty of the Black Mountains and the orc dried up like a staunched wound. Hammergrim Pass was abandoned and the dwarfs returned to fight the Goblin Wars or whatever dwarfs do. Kurtbad became a ghost town overnight. The inn was closed and its keeper, who was a businessman, left for Nuln with a girl from Kurtbad he had married. She later returned to the village with a young child, no money and a brand on her arm. The inn was knocked down. Perhaps it was anger or perhaps the people of Kurtbad needed the wood for their sheep pens, living in wolf country as they did.

  Nevertheless, in the space of a generation, the village had purged itself of the influence of the dwarfs and merchants, and grass had grown on the road to Hammergrim Pass.

  Into this small village, a single black stitch on the great embroidered map which hangs in the commerce hall of the Merchant’s Guild in the city of Nuln, came a black horse with hooves of silver. On its back was a tall man clad in dark cloth. He wore a hat the colour of coal, with a plume which must have been dyed because no one knew of any bird with feathers like that. He wore a sword and a knife, in the manner of a gentleman, and his boots were of soft leather, also stained the colour of moonless night. His arms were scarred and scratched, from old battles and new, and he grasped the reins with his left hand as if the right was unequal to the task.

  He sat on his horse for some time, surveying the village and its people as they stirred in the dawn grey. He sat there long enough for Wilhelm, chastened for being asleep on duty at the barn, to ring the huge bronze bell. This bell was the last remnant of the dwarf mining days, except for the occasional brightly painted rail which kept the sheep in. It had originally been used to warn the wagons as they left the mountain trail that the road was too muddy for reliable passage and they should wait for a drier day. Now the bell, which bore the crossed hammer and axe stamp of the miners, was struck with a mallet to summon the villagers to the common, the steam mechanism long since decayed.

  I am a snake. I am a worm. There is poison in my blood. I can never die a peaceful death. I am burning now as I will burn then.

  Gunter heard the bell as he stared for the fifth time at the place where Gregor’s body had been found. There were signs to read here, he knew that, answers written in the ground as clear as any illuminated manuscript.

  Just as he couldn’t read the scratchings in ink which adorned the pages of his father’s books, so he couldn’t comprehend the signs in the mud which had hardened and cracked since Gregor’s violent death two days ago. He had found the pieces of clay from the shattered bottle, but they only served to confuse things further. The only marks he could read reliably were his own deep boot prints, four sets.

  He turned away and straightened himself as he made his way to face whatever disaster had befallen Kurtbad now.

  Anja looked out between the curtains of Gunter’s cottage. The man sat si
lently on his horse like a sculpture cast in black leather. She thought he didn’t look well. He had the balance of a drunkard, and as she watched he shut his eyes and swayed like a young tree in a breeze. Anja pulled on the shoes which Gunter had bought for her on one of his trips to Nuln and unbolted the door.

  She was the first of the villagers to approach the man and she straightened her hair as she walked carefully towards him. He made no sign of having seen her, so she moved around to the front of his horse. The big brown eyes of the stallion regarded her critically but the man’s head remained slumped. There was a stain of dried blood, Anja knew it by its colour, on the man’s right wrist, above his black leather glove. Anja could see he was alive; his chest rose and fell slowly.

  She summoned up the courage to address him without considering that she didn’t know how one should properly address a witch hunter.

  Gunter drew breath and held the air in until all the goodness had been taken from it. A witch hunter. Just what we don’t need.

  He sized the man up. Anja had helped the man from his horse, which was now grazing contentedly on the lush grass of the Kurtbad common, before Gunter had banished her inside. Foolish girl. These witch hunters had no purpose but the discovery and destruction of Chaos, he knew that, and although there was a dangerous killer on the loose, perhaps even a monster of some kind, the man in black might be just as dangerous. Didn’t she know that? Of course she did.

  Even now she watched proceedings from the window and heated water on the stove for the man. Anything to make contact with the world outside Kurtbad, that was what Anja wanted. Why can she not be content with me? Gunter knew that it was likely only his training and foreign postings with the Empire army had brought Anja to his home in the first place, and that was a fragile bargain he was determined to protect.

  He turned his attention to the witch hunter. The man sat slumped against the wall of his house like a wilted flower, except that he knew no blooms that were the colour of Death. Gunter addressed him formally, welcoming him to Kurtbad and asking his business.

  When the man spoke it was in a voice which sounded like it was squeezed through a throat too small to let the words pass, and he shut his eyes in pain. His name was Dagmar, he was indeed a witch hunter, and he knew about the troubles in Kurtbad. Gunter had no choice but to offer him the hospitality of his cottage.

  Dagmar lay in the strange bed and contemplated the rafters. They were oaken and old. Like strong ribs which held the thatched skin of the roof from collapsing, they met at a huge beam, a great rounded trunk which still bore bark in some places. A crossbow hung from one end of it, he noticed, well oiled and maintained. The other held cooking pots and bundles of roots and spices.

  Dagmar shifted in the bed and turned his head to watch the girl who stirred the pot. A whip-crack of pain shot through his ribs when he turned his body to the side, so he contented himself with the briefest of glances and returned to looking at the thatching. Grey sunlight filtered between the straw; it lay across him like gashes.

  He had allowed the girl to remove his boots but otherwise he was clad as he had been when he arrived, in ill-fitting witch hunter’s clothes. The fight in the forest last night had almost been his last and only the overconfidence of his opponent had saved him. Dagmar waited patiently for the girl to return with the stew she was making and wondered if his luck might be changing.

  Anja had to feed the man as he couldn’t easily sit up. Gunter had not told her his name, saying that he thought it was better if she didn’t know such things. He had gone now, to attend to the horse or get wood or something.

  She fed the man patiently, noting that he was most polite. He told her his name in an attempt to learn hers. She learnt that he was called Dagmar and freely named herself. What was the danger in that? From what she knew of witch hunters, they were good folk who hunted monsters throughout the Empire. She had never seen one but Gunter had occasionally mentioned them in one of his many travel stories. If he had come here to catch Gregor’s murderer then wasn’t that a good thing?

  She looked at the man’s mud-spattered and blood-stained clothes. Normally she would have undressed him and washed his clothes for him. He was clearly wounded beneath the expensive garb. Gunter had not protested when the man had climbed into his bed fully clothed but Anja had seen his face. She did not want to anger him further. Not now.

  I am evil and it is consuming me. There is no place in me but hate. There is no place in me but disease. Do not touch me.

  Gunter cut wood as if each log was the head of an enemy. He saw many faces beneath the wedge as he drove it deeply into the chopping block—goblins, Bretonnians, men who he had slain or almost slain. Most of all, he saw what he imagined was the face of the monster who must have killed Gregor: scaled, with tusks and fangs. The creature’s head split with a satisfying snap but there was nothing inside. He lifted his axe for the coup de grace but the face he saw became that of his guest and he held the stroke.

  Angry with himself for unworthy and inhospitable thoughts, Gunter reasoned, as he gathered the wood, that the witch hunter had done nothing to earn his enmity. Perhaps he could bring resources to bear on the problem that would enable them to catch the killer. He determined to consult with this Dagmar, after they had all eaten, and returned to the house in a better mood.

  What he saw as he came through the low door destroyed his good nature as surely as if a daemon-wizard had banished it to another realm.

  Anja mopped Dagmar’s brow with one of Gunter’s kerchiefs and sat by him as he dozed. When Gunter returned with the wood she was cleaning the cut on the man’s right arm. The wound was not very deep but had bled a great deal and had ragged edges like a newly ploughed track. She tried to take off his leather glove but he clenched his fist; the pain was obviously too great.

  She bathed his arm and wrist but did not ask to take off the glove again. There was clearly something wrong with the arm, which had a bulge in it where hers did not. He had talked of a fight in the forest. Perhaps he had broken a bone then. When Gunter suggested she should return to her mother while the stranger stayed in his house, she shrugged him off. Gunter might be a great soldier but he had no idea how to look after a sick man. When he tried to order her, she responded by reminding him that they had taken no vows and that she only need take orders from her mother until such a time as they did.

  Things became more heated and Anja was forced to stop stitching her sling and stand up to face him.

  Dagmar got out of bed at this point and made excuses about needing to perform his ablutions.

  Anja’s pointed comment about the stranger’s good manners did nothing to pacify Gunter.

  When he returned, she had gone and Gunter sat by the soup pot. Dagmar could not be sure whether the man or the fire glowed more hotly.

  The two men found they could talk easily enough and Dagmar imagined that he might have more in common with this lonely man than he thought.

  For his own part, Gunter was surprised to find himself trusting the engaging witch hunter, and rethinking what he knew about their kind. This man, Dagmar, although very knowledgeable about mutant creatures of Chaos, was unlike any witch hunter he had ever heard of.

  Dagmar talked with Gunter for several hours, making various suggestions for the defence of the village. He suggested, and this is just one example of his useful ideas, that some mutants have thick, strong necks, and might survive a hanging. Dagmar proposed the building of a pyre, with a stake set into it, so that the criminal, when captured, could be burned.

  He also said that the mutant was quite possibly living in the village and promised to hunt the man down. Dagmar asked many keen questions about the habits of the villagers of Kurtbad, and Gunter told him who was reliable and who perhaps was not. Then Gunter took a deep breath and told Dagmar his suspicions.

  I am unclean. How can you not smell it on my breath? The rot of my body, the decay of my heart. We are so much the same, and so different.

  Otto Fleischer was a
very fat man. He was not a nice man. If the villagers knew everything there was to know about Otto, instead of just suspecting it, they would never have let him be their butcher, let alone their undertaker. When Otto had buried Gregor he had made no secret that he would not grieve for the man.

  Anja thought that the cottage looked like Gunter had been carousing all night with one of his mercenary friends who occasionally came to Kurtbad, most likely to hide from the law, and not like the place where a sick man had been quartered. There were two empty clay bottles next to the fire and Gunter was snoring loudly. He had obviously slept on the hearthstone and his face was covered with a thin layer of ash which lifted in tiny clouds with each snore. The veins on his cheeks were red like a fox and his moustache curled upward on one side.

  Anja looked at this man, her lover, as a farmer might appraise a new-born lamb, and turned as if to compare his visage with Dagmar’s. The bed was empty.

  Anja put the steaming breakfast she had brought onto the scarred table and walked outside.

  Dagmar eased the glove off his right hand and washed both in the stream. The small stream ran down from the Black Mountains beside the road from Hammergrim Pass and beneath the stone bridge at the north of the village. The small graveyard for the people of Kurtbad lay on the top of the opposite bank. The water was like knives of ice but the hand was mostly numb anyway. He stared at it in disgust.