Amidst the ensuing chaos that followed the lunatic’s flight
from the infirmary, Dieter found it easy to slip away from the Temple of Shallya
himself. Once out of the courtyard precinct of the temple he turned right, away
from the direction in which the guild lay—trying not to look upon the frontage
of the grand Temple of Sigmar as he did so—and ducked into Handwerker Bahn.
From there he secreted himself in the darkening back streets of the low class
residential and commercial district that lay behind the facade of the
Göttenplatz and Dreiecke Platz. He was certain that, in the wake of a dangerous
lunatic escaping from the Temple of Shallya, there would be a hue and cry
throughout the town. And sooner or later, the watch—or worse, the witch
hunters—would doubtless become involved and Dieter did not want to find
himself caught between them and their quarry, or else he might become the quarry
himself.
Working his way back, roughly north-east, through the town,
Dieter began to trace a path back to his lodgings, once again taking a long and
circuitous indirect route. The night was unusually clear, free from fog and
cloud. The veil of the sky above him was speckled with the milk drops of
constellations. It was said that some sorcerers could divine meaning from the
patterns the distant stars made as they travelled across the firmament of
heaven, but Dieter could see nothing but the all-enveloping blackness of night.
He was half-expecting to encounter trouble on his way home,
but not the sort of trouble that eventually found him. The first he knew of the
ambush was when two figures—one squat and thickset, one tall and muscled like
an ox—detached themselves from the shadows of a sunken doorway. He knew them
at once.
Neither of the two body snatchers said a word. Neither needed
to. The cudgels they held in their hands spoke their intent perfectly clearly.
Was it chance that they had happened upon him or had they been hunting him all
night? Did a lone scholar on his own at night present them with an easier option
than ransacking a grave for a body, or was their purpose purely to do away with
him?
Dieter tensed, ready to run. The two brutes took a step
towards him.
Screaming like a banshee, an apparition clad in white
appeared out of the darkness, bounding past Dieter and throwing itself at the
shorter of the two grave robbers.
The man staggered backwards and lost his footing as Anselm
Fleischer landed on him, ripping open the man’s leather tunic and sinking his
nails into the body snatcher’s chest and shoulder. He fell backwards onto the
muck splattered cobbles. Anselm gave a feral snarl and sank his teeth into the
man’s neck. Blood flowed. The grave robber cried out in anger and pain, trying
to beat the madman from him.
“Physician, heal thyself!” the madman growled through a
mouthful of flesh.
Confounded by this totally unexpected counter-attack, the
larger brute simply watched dumbfounded as the lunatic savaged his companion
like some feral beast.
Dieter did not wait to see what happened next. He turned tail
and ran.
Dieter stopped, panting for breath, hands on his knees. He
had no idea where he had run to nor for how long. As he began to recover himself
he looked up to see a familiar street sign. He was back at Apothekar Allee
again. Doktor Drakus’ abode stood before him. Where it had seemed deathly
before there was now something empty about its appearance.
As if his feet had a mind and intent all of their own, Dieter
approached the door of the house. It stood slightly ajar. All thought of his
visit to the infirmary-temple, the lunatic’s escape and his encounter with the
body snatchers was suddenly gone. He put a hand to the door, just as he had done
in his dream, and with a moan of seized hinges it swung open before him.
Then he was inside the house, at the top of the slime-slick
steps leading down into the tomb-cold basement, then at the bottom of the steps,
then at the threshold to the laboratory chamber. And there he saw—
Nothing. The vault was utterly bare, apart from the abandoned
lantern. Then, its oil used up at last, the light flickered and died.
Dieter ran back up the stairs into the house. Up to the first
floor and into the library; at least where there had once been a library. The
books were missing too. The house had been cleared out utterly. And Doktor
Drakus was gone.
I can still remember the first time I took another man’s
life, as clearly as if it happened only yesterday.
There have been so many since. The templar knight, the
desperate street-walker, the mercenary soldier, the naive priest, the scolding
fishwife, the leech-thing and his elemental creation the coarse sexton, the
half-drunk militiamen, the pompous burgomeister, the guildsman, my own
apprentice, the whiskered rat-catcher, the twin innocents, the grave robber, the
avaricious thief. I could go on. But I still remember the first.
I can see his face now, as I squeezed the life from him. I
can see the bulging, bloodshot eyes, the protruding swollen tongue, the puffed
cheeks turning from red to purple. I can hear the spluttering, rasping gargle of
the man choking, gasping for breath that would never come. I feel his desperate
hands clawing at mine, the nails ripping through the skin into my flesh. And I
feel my hands closing tighter and tighter about his neck, crushing his windpipe.
I feel the bones of his neck grating against each other.
And I remember how it made me feel. The horror, the
disbelief, the fear, the desperation, the panic, the unreality of it, the
disconnectedness. The adrenalin rush. The sick excitement. The power.
Looking back now I realise that having taken that step, I was
damned forever. I had passed the point of no return. There was no going back.
There would be no forgiveness. No redemption. From that moment on, although I
tried to fight it, my fate was already sealed.
Once the first steps are taken along that dark path, there is
no going back.
Dieter Heydrich was there to witness the cold-blooded murder
of Anselm Fleischer when the witch hunters executed the lunatic for the
sacrilegious crimes committed by the Corpse Taker.
The execution took place on the one night of the year, above
all others, when anyone who valued their life or their sanity stayed at home. It
was the night when dark things were abroad within the world. It was the Night of
Mystery. Geheimnisnacht.
In certain remote villages and hamlets across the Empire,
where people more readily suffered the predations of the servants of darker
powers, the populace would bar themselves in until the sun rose on the first day
of Nachgeheim, for fear of what might be abroad on that night.
This Geheimnisnacht was an uncomfortable, sweltering night.
The day had been the same, the atmosphere oppressive, ever promising thunder but
the weather never delivering on that promise. The oppressive atmosphere remained
as night fell, as did the humid heat.
The bells of the Temple of Sigmar chimed nine o’ clock. Both
moons hung in the light-leeched sky, full and threatening, directly above the
pyre constructed outside the temple in the Göttenplatz. The fissured face of
green-hazed Morrslieb even appeared to be smiling like a feral predator.
Although people knew better than to be out on Geheimnisnacht,
they had still come in their droves to see the Corpse Taker burn at the stake,
the bogeyman of their nightmares laid to rest at last.
The crowd pointed at the two moons and muttered amongst
themselves, making the sign of the holy hammer or touching iron to guard against
evil. But still they had come.
The capture of the Corpse Taker had been the talk of the town
for the last week, so much so that even Dieter, hiding away in his garret study,
had come to hear of it. He had heard how the lunatic had been captured by a
cadre of Sigmarites, led by Brother-Captain Krieger himself, the madman having
attacked the town’s sextons, who tended the graves for Father Hulbert in the
garden of Morr, following his escape from the Temple of Shallya. Krieger had not
been as understanding as either the physicians’ guild or the Sisters of Shallya.
Dieter had heard that Anselm Fleischer had been subjected to the torturers’
ministrations following which he had confessed to being the Corpse Taker and of
having committed all the crimes of which he’d been accused, and more still.
His death had been inevitable, not only from that point when
he had admitted to every accusation the witch hunters made against him, Dieter
thought, but from the moment he had been seized by the Order of Sigmar; perhaps
from the moment he had broken free from the infirmary to escape Dieter’s
interrogation. Surely his death warrant had been written from the moment his
will had been turned by the malevolent Doktor Drakus, working away behind the
scenes of this morality play all along—seemingly directing everything that was
happening to Dieter even. That was the way fate worked.
It had been Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger and not fate,
however, who had decided that the Corpse Taker should be put to death on
Geheimnisnacht. Many, even among the Church of Sigmar, riled at the idea.
Krieger was as superstitious and as fearful as the next man, it was the message
that he was giving that was important. The fact that the fiend who had
terrorised Bögenhafen for the best part of nine months would perish on
Geheimnisnacht would be a sign to all other malefactors and evildoers that they
would have no power over Sigmar-fearing men, even on the treacherous Night of
Mystery.
Dieter hung back at the edge of the square, cloaked and
hooded despite the warm night. Moving from foot to foot he could see what was
taking place on the other side of the Göttenplatz.
Anselm Fleischer wasn’t the only one to suffer the judgement
of the witch hunters that night. Two others were to be put to the torch: an
overweight merchant and his unnatural youthful lover. Their unholy lascivious
union had been declared an act of dedication to the blasphemous Prince of
Pleasure.
The dignitaries of the faith of the Heldenhammer were also
there. The citizens of Bögenhafen who were in attendance were from all walks of
life and all levels of society, including members of the town council as well as
representatives of the guilds, to see that Sigmar’s will was done.
Dieter saw Professor Theodrus there too, keen to show he
condoned the action taken against Anselm Fleischer, and thereby disassociating
himself and the guild from the madman’s crimes. Dieter pulled the hood of his
cloak further over his face, just in case somehow, amidst the sea of faces,
Theodrus was able to pick him out.
Krieger stood proudly next to the much less impressive figure
of the Lector of Sigmar, a blazing brand in his leather-gloved hand, ready to
set the fires of divine retribution himself. Before Sigmar’s will was enacted,
the lector mumbled something spiritual to the condemned and blessed the masses
observing the whole perverse ritual.
The three heretic criminals did not accept their fate with
good grace, accepting their sins and seeing this as an opportunity to be
cleansed of their wickedness. Anselm thrashed and riled against the ropes that
bound him, calling on the secret masters of the undead and even grinning
Morrslieb to deliver him. His madness had utterly consumed him at last.
Hearing his poisonous blasphemies the crowd responded in
kind, calling to the witch hunter captain to finish his work here and send the
Corpse Taker to join the Dark Powers he venerated in the world beyond.
The younger of the other two heretics sobbed and wailed
hysterically. The merchant said nothing: the ordeals he had endured to extract
his confession having practically killed him already. He sagged limply in his
bindings, his chin hanging down on his chest, either unconscious or catatonic.
And then something happened that chilled Dieter’s blood and
made his heart skip a beat.
It seemed to Dieter that of all the hundreds of people
thronging the Göttenplatz, Anselm, tied to the stake atop the pyre, fixed
him
with his mad-eyed gaze. The madman’s words echoed from the temple buildings
crowding the square, and over the heads of the people gathered there, as though
he were speaking directly to him.
“Physician, heal thyself!”
They were the last words Anselm Fleischer ever spoke.
Dieter was sure that Anselm Fleischer could not be the Corpse
Taker. How could he have carried out all the morbid things the Corpse Taker was
accused of when he had been kept a virtual prisoner in a cell within the Temple
of Shallya, watched day and night by the priestesses who served there? And it
certainly hadn’t been Anselm Fleischer who Dieter had watched performing some
unspeakable rite in the vault under the house in Apothekar Allee.
As Dieter watched Anselm burn and listened to his inhuman
screams, the physician’s apprentice felt numb, as though a part of himself had
died. But better that Anselm die, a wretched insane fool with nothing to live
for, than Dieter Heydrich.
The effete Chaos-worshipper cried out for pity as the flames
rose until the spark-blown smoke choked his lungs. Greasy black smoke eventually
obscured the victims of Krieger’s brutal justice. The flames crackled and spat
as the bodies crisped and blackened. The stink of over-cooked spit-roast meat
which assaulted his nostrils made Dieter gag involuntarily.
The execution over, the crowd quickly dispersed, the
townsfolk reasoning that it was not wise to tempt fate any longer on the night
of Geheimnisnacht, and set off for home. Dieter did the same although his
motivations were more inspired by not wanting to attract the attentions of
Brother-Captain Krieger. If the witch hunter had a mind to, it would not be
difficult for him to connect Dieter to the wrongly executed Anselm Fleischer.