It was only as he squatted, hunkered down on the cemetery
side of the wall, straining his ears for anything more from the brigands, that
Dieter became aware of the flickering lamplight, painting the tombstones behind
him with a lambent orange glow. Keeping himself crouched low, Dieter turned his
head and carefully surveyed the enclosed plot, feeling his pulse rate rising
again.
Dieter had entered the garden close to its eastern corner.
The mortuary chapel stood a good fifty yards away between the sullen yew trees
and grand mausoleums of Bögenhafen’s noble merchant families. Like so many
graveyards across the Empire it had been here a long time. There had probably
been some sort of burial ground here since before the founding of Bögenhafen,
when the first settlement at this point of the River Bögen had grown up, and
parts of its two-acre plot had become neglected and fallen into disrepair.
But between him and the chapel of Morr, their work obscured
by the lines of tumbled grave markers, Dieter could see two men busy in the
graveyard, watched by the silent yew trees.
So engrossed were they in their work that they did not seem
to have heard the confrontation on the road half a mile away, and they certainly
weren’t aware of Dieter’s presence in the cemetery. One was tall and thickset,
with hulking shoulders and thickly muscled arms. His associate was short and
stocky, but something about the way he was putting a pickaxe to good use also
suggested that there was greater strength in his stout frame.
From what Dieter could make out between the stones, and from
the skittering, scraping sounds he could hear, it was clear to him that the two
men were busy digging, but were they digging a new grave, or breaking open an
old one?
The yews made sinister clawing shapes against the velvet
backdrop of the clear night. The combination of Mannslieb’s silvery light and
the flickering illumination of the lantern the men had placed on the ground
close to where they were working only served to make the trees appear even more
forbidding.
For a moment, Dieter almost forgot about the highwaymen’s
pursuit, so intrigued was he by what was taking place in front of him in the
graveyard. It could be that he was simply watching the town sexton and his
assistant about their work but something else, something that resonated with him
as Albrecht Heydrich’s son, felt that these men could hardly be up to any good.
Why go about their business at night otherwise? And he had heard of men such as
these before; grave robbers, body snatchers, resurrection men. Unearthing the
bodies of the dead for other equally nefarious individuals, providing them with
the raw materials to carry out their macabre and possibly heretical experiments.
Corpse takers.
What was it about this night that so many felons were
compelled to carry out their despicable business at this time? Dieter glanced at
the heavens. Mannslieb shone silently down on all that was coming to pass
beneath him but, it being only a month since the spring equinox, the ominous
face of Morrslieb was barely visible in its erratic cycle.
The shorter of the two grave thieves had now got into the
hole the two were excavating. Dieter thought he heard a splintering crack and
then more sounds like that of mouldering wooden planks being worked apart.
Pickaxe and spade were downed and then, with a lot of huffing and puffing, the
shorter man heaved something up out of the hole. His burden was taken by the
taller, broader man who effortlessly hefted the object out of the pit and onto
the pile of earth that had been created by their exertions next to it. The tall
man then helped his companion up out of the hole and they both picked up the
object between them.
Dieter could hardly believe what he was seeing. At first he
tried to convince himself that it was only a sack that they were carrying in an
ungainly manner between them. But when the worm-eaten remains of a grey-fleshed
arm flopped out of the side of the muddy, cloth bundle, Dieter’s suspicions were
confirmed. The macabre felons had exhumed a corpse from its alleged final
resting place. And indeed they had put it inside a sack, making some semblance
of an effort to hide the evidence of the blasphemous activities.
The body snatchers laid the sackcloth bundle on a hand-drawn
cart they had positioned close to the grave they were desecrating. Dieter moved
forward carefully and quietly to get a better view. The two men picked up their
tools again and quickly filled in the now empty grave. Once they were done, they
stowed their tools on the cart as well. As the shorter of the two recovered the
lantern and closed its shutters, the larger man took up his position between the
traces of the cart and began pulling it over the uneven lawns of the cemetery.
The body snatchers were heading towards the northern edge of the garden.
Dieter knew immediately what he should do. It was his duty,
as a Morr-fearing man, to report these two ghoulish villains to the town
authorities. Their kind was an abomination in Morr’s presence. And where was the
resident priest of Morr whilst grave robbing was taking place in the land that
it was his responsibility to tend? Perhaps Dieter’s first action should be to
find Father Hulbert and alert him to the crime-taking place here, under his very
nose.
But Dieter also knew that this business wasn’t finished yet.
Where were the body snatchers taking the corpse? Why had they picked on this
poor soul’s grave in particular? Who was the one paying them to commit this
terrible crime? Was the Corpse Taker back to practising his evil ways? Dieter’s
report would be of more use to the watch or the religious authorities the more
he could tell them. He might even be able to implicate any others involved in
this law breaking.
Skulking between the skull-carved crypts and broken
tombstones, Dieter cautiously followed the two body snatchers. They continued to
lead him north across the garden and thanks to the clearness of the night, he
saw that they were leading him towards a gap in the cemetery wall where the dry
stone wall had collapsed. The cart bumped over the rubble as the two men
manhandled it through the space. Then they proceeded to follow the towering town
wall, hidden in its looming, pitch-black shadow, towards the river still a good
two hundred and fifty yards away, gurgling its way through the town.
Dieter stopped again at the hole in the cemetery wall. In all
the time that he had been observing the grave robbers, Dieter had not heard them
speak once. These were men used to working clandestinely and not drawing
attention to themselves. They had given him no clue as to where they were going.
If they were making their way to the river, for all he knew they might be
heading for a destination downstream and not one in the town at all. He would
follow them for just a little longer. He had completely forgotten about the
attack on the road that had led him into this curious and slightly sinister
situation.
Just a little further, Dieter thought, as he came in sight of
the river and saw the flat-bottomed skiff moored there, tethered to a willow
leaning out over the river. Dieter would not have considered himself a
particularly brave individual but he had a duty to fulfil here; he was the only
one who had witnessed the exhumation and subsequent corpse-theft.
Just a little further, Dieter thought, as he watched the two
men punt the boat upstream, with the body now aboard, past the edge of the high,
crenellated town wall towards Bögenhafen’s night-muffled docks.
Before he had fully thought through the implications of what
he was doing; Dieter found himself up to his knees in water and river-mud,
hugging his scrip to his chest with one hand as he used the other, which was
also clutching his shoes, to steady himself against the river bank. He then
circumnavigated the end of the town wall, creeping into Bögenhafen through the
river gate. Paradoxically he felt like some kind of felon himself for doing so.
And if Dieter was honest, it was not so much his sense of justice that kept him
following the body snatchers but his own irrepressible curiosity.
The trail led onwards. Dieter’s quarry moored their boat to a
stone post on the brick-shored edge of the docks and between them hauled the
shrouded body out of the skiff. An eerie mist was rising off the river, its
creeping tendrils oozing across the docks and filling the streets, obscuring
buildings and smothering the sounds of the sleeping town. Once they were both on
the dockside themselves, the taller man slung the body unceremoniously over his
shoulder and with the shorter grave robber leading the way, they scuttled off
down a darkened alleyway that passed between two boarded warehouses.
Unseen by the men, Dieter hauled himself out of the foetid
stinking mud of the river’s shore, clambering up a ladder at the end of a wooden
slatted jetty, and followed them into the dark mouth of the alley. The
adrenaline was racing in his veins again, just as it had when he had found his
life in jeopardy on the Nuln road. But where before he had felt terrified,
fearing for his life, now it was almost as frighteningly down to the sheer rush
of excitement.
Dieter following the corpse takers through the mist-shrouded
town, taking care to keep out of sight and never get too close, ducking into
concealing doorways and winding side-streets whenever he could, but at the same
time making sure that he did not lose sight of them himself in the
disorientating fog. And like those he was pursuing, Dieter did as little to draw
attention to himself as possible.
The two body snatchers led Dieter on a twisting, circuitous
tour of the town until he was totally lost, the thickening mists helping to
change Bögenhafen’s previously familiar appearance. The trail eventually came to
an end in a part of town that Dieter was certain that he didn’t know, where he
had never been before. It was one of the poorer, more rundown parts, of that he
could hardly be mistaken. Dieter watched as the grave robbers stopped outside an
unremarkable town house with a plain facade. In fact, from the appearance of the
outside of the building, it looked like the house had been abandoned. Its
windows were shuttered but, to Dieter, it was like staring into the lifeless
eye-sockets of a skull. They made it look like the building itself had died.
Dieter glanced up at the street sign opposite his position
hidden at the corner of the last alley the two men had led him down. It was just
visible through the grey-dark murk. It read Apothekar Allee.
Positioned as it was on the River Bögen, the land the town
had been built on was predominantly flat. The ground did rise gently beyond the
artisans’ quarter and in the area of the Adel Ring, where the richest of the
town citizens resided. In poorer parts of the town the street level rose where
houses and warehouses had been built over the ruins of previous buildings, the
rooms of those remaining ruins having been absorbed, becoming cellars and
secret, sealed rooms. Apothekar Allee was one such area.
Dieter continued to watch as the shorter of the two men
looked about him furtively, aware that others might be observing their
skulduggery. It seemed to him that the man’s eyes met his for a brief second,
but then the body snatcher looked away again. Dieter ducked back out of sight,
his heart pounding in his chest. Had the man seen him? Was he at this very
moment coming after him like the highwaymen had done? Dieter had to know.
He peered back around the end of the alleyway, legs ready to
run if he had to. He was just in time to see the men being admitted to the
house, along with their macabre bundle, by a cadaverous manservant carrying a
single, flickering candle. Then the dark wood door was closed behind them.
Dieter did not wait around for very much longer after that.
Looking into those dark shuttered windows of the house made Dieter feel
uncomfortable, as if he were looking into the soulless eyes of a dead thing.
Turning his back on the darkly shuttered windows, feeling an
unnatural cold chill the blood in his veins and a knot of fear clenching his
stomach, Dieter left the house in Apothekar Allee. It took him a while to find
his way back to a part of the town he recognised amidst the pervasive river
mists, constantly looking back over his shoulder nervously at the way he had
come, and he narrowly avoided two watch patrols as he made his way to his own
lodgings in Dunst Strasse.
As he put his hand on the handle to open the door, a lonely
temple bell chimed twelve times. Dieter froze, feeling the chill seep deeper
into his bones and a wave of nauseous fear pass through his entire body. It was
midnight, when all the malevolent things in the world went about their evil
work. It was the witching hour. It was the time of black magicians and
necromancers.
It was the time of the corpse takers.
They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing;
never was a truer word spoken. Some would say it is the quest for knowledge that
is what defines us as being superior to the lesser races of our world. Some
would say it has driven mankind to become the dominant species of our world, and
that it has made the Empire the dominant power of the Old World.
I could speak of Leonardo di Miragliano’s steam tank,
Todmeister’s harquebus or Avel Ferrara’s subterranean drilling machine. Wondrous
accomplishments all, but none achieved without first taking their own toll in
human lives.
But it could also be argued that it is the insatiable quest
for knowledge, man’s inherent and iniquitous curiosity, that has brought us to
the brink of destruction. For it is scholars and greedy men searching the ruined
necropolises of the ancient Nehekharans that has led to the disruption of
eons-long sleep of the tomb kings of the Lands of the Dead. It has been the
study of the esoteric arts within the lauded establishments of the Colleges of
Magic in decadent Altdorf that has set so many magicians on the path of
darkness. I could speak of Egrimm van Horstmann, the Grand Magister. I could
speak of Heinrich Kemmler, or the Doomlord of Middenheim.