Erich had “acquired” much of the equipment and Dieter had
chosen not to ask how. Dieter had simply told him what he needed and Erich had
found it for him. Around all of it was erected a sackcloth curtain so that
should someone unexpected find their way into the warehouse, they would not
immediately see what it was being used for.
They had moved Dieter’s things from Dunst Strasse over the
course of several evenings, so as to again try to avoid arousing anyone’s
suspicions or attracting unwanted attention by wheeling a cart through the town
laden with books and bizarre pieces of equipment.
Behind where Dieter’s temporary laboratory had been set up,
towards the back of the musty warehouse, a trapdoor covered the pit into which
the results of Dieter’s previous experiments had been dropped: vermin,
amphibians and the like that he had managed to give life to again, an unlife
that they had somehow clung on to and which had told Dieter he was ready for the
next stage, to attempt something more impressive, to transfer the skills he had
learnt. The inhabitants of the pit burped and flopped, croaked and chattered,
splashed and scratched in the dank, lightless hole.
Dieter was under no illusion that it would be much harder to
bring a human being back to life; a human being was so much more complex a
creation than a frog or a fish. But it was not an impossible task to achieve.
And it was that matter he and Erich were discussing when they were interrupted.
“So where do we get our corpse?” Dieter was asking.
“T-That shouldn’t be too hard with a plague decimating the
town populace,” Erich gurgled.
In the last few months a dramatic change had come over Erich
as well. When Dieter had first got to know him, months ago now, he had wanted to
be more like the confident, rebellious Erich. And now he was, only Erich had
become something less than the naive priest’s son from the country, who had
first arrived in Bögenhafen wanting to change the world.
“But it can’t be just any body. Not for the first time. I
don’t want one that’s too badly disfigured by the disease or that has been left
to rot for too long. I certainly don’t want anything from one of those
lime-slaked grave pits they’ve dug out beyond Morr’s field.”
Dieter had collated and combined the knowledge he had
uncovered from the undoubtedly proscribed books he had taken from Drakus’
library with what he had taught himself and discovered from actually using his
powers. And having been surrounded by death from an early age, he knew what he
needed.
“W-We could ask the doktor’s b-body snatchers. The sexton and
his f-friend,” Erich stammered. An insane glimmer flashed in Erich’s eyes. “I
k-know where I can f-find them.”
“Very well. But you know my demands,” Dieter said, “and be
subtle about it.”
Both Dieter and Erich jumped as the sackcloth curtain was
suddenly yanked back.
“So this is where you’ve got to!”
“Leopold!” Dieter exclaimed.
Leopold Hanser stood before them now, wearing a long leather
coat, the posy-packed bird-beaked mask of a plague-doktor under one arm, an
appalled expression on his face. Magnanimous as ever, he had obviously been out
doing what he could to halt the spread of the terrible disease besetting the
town.
“I wondered what had happened to you and then when I saw this
wretch”—he pointed at Erich—“skulking his way along the Bergstrasse as I
went about my guild-appointed business, I decided to follow him and find out,
thinking he might lead me to you. And sure enough he has.”
“I-lt’s not what you think,” Erich said suddenly, leaping
between Dieter and Leopold.
“What are you doing? Why are you protecting him?”
Leopold moved and glanced at what he saw laid out before him
again.
“Dieter, what in Shallya’s name are you going to do here?”
Leopold looked at him with pleading eyes, worry etched in every line of his
furrowed brow. “I thought I heard you talking about body snatchers and a corpse
and now I see tools laid out as though for an autopsy.”
Dieter said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. Shame,
anger, frustration and doubt were all welling up inside him; ambivalent emotions
battling for dominance.
The look of worry on Leopold’s face became one of horror as
he took a step forward into the operating theatre-cum-laboratory space.
“And why would you have to do this here? Why not at the
guild?” he was practically thinking aloud now.
“W-We’re not doing anything here!” Erich was panicking.
“Unless what you’re planning is proscribed by the guild.”
Leopold turned to Dieter again. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you wouldn’t do such
a thing, Dieter.”
Dieter opened his mouth to speak, but still couldn’t find the
words.
“By all the gods! I thought the templars had burnt the fiend
at the stake but it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Corpse Taker, Dieter, aren’t
you?”
Leopold barged past Dieter and picked up a notebook, open at
a page on which Dieter had attempted to record the invocation he had heard
Drakus make over the gutted corpse in his cellar, underneath drawings of the
hand gestures he had made.
“This is sorcery,” Leopold gasped. “Witchcraft. By my oath,
you’re necromancers!”
A cold chill settled in the pit of Dieter’s stomach. He was
not that. He would not be called
that.
They were an anathema to all he
stood for. He wanted to save lives, not end them, and that was what necromancers
sought to do, to bring an end to all things in the name of their dark lords of
undeath.
“We are not necromancers!” Erich screeched.
“I’ll have to alert the witch hunters. It’s for your own
good, for the good of Bögenhafen. By Shallya, it could be your work here that
has brought this damned plague upon the town!”
Leopold sounded hysterical now.
“You will not go to them! We are not necromancers!” Erich
shrieked, bearing down on Leopold arms outstretched, hands become grasping
claws. “You will not! Or I’ll… I’ll…”
“What?” Leopold challenged, backing away from the advancing
maniac. “Or you’ll what?”
Leopold backed into Dieter. He gasped and turned around,
surprised. His panicked eyes met the cold, glassy orbs of Dieter’s.
Hands closed around Leopold’s neck. Dieter’s hands.
He was
not
a necromancer. He would not have
anyone
call him that!
His grip tightened. Leopold’s eyes bulged. His fat tongue
protruded from his mouth.
He would not have anyone call him
that.
Leopold’s face turned from red to vein-bulging purple. His
desperate hands pulled on Dieter’s wrists, clawed at Dieter’s steely grip, tore
the skin until the blood ran. Desperate feet kicked against his shins.
Erich hung back, giggling.
He was not a necromancer.
A strangled sound rose from somewhere within Leopold that a
part of Dieter realised could only be his death rattle, for how could anyone
living make such an inhuman, rasping sound?
He was not that.
Beneath the flesh squeezed between his fingers, Dieter felt
bones shift and grate.
Then there was silence, and Leopold stopped struggling. His
body sagged. In fact there was no movement at all. Dieter let go and Leopold’s
body fell to the warehouse floor.
Erich capered from foot to foot, dancing a macabre jig. His
cackling swelled to full-blown maniacal laughter.
Dieter just stood there, the colour draining from his cheeks.
What had he done? He had killed a man. But more than that, he had murdered the
man he had once considered to be his best, possibly his only, true friend.
Erich looked from the cooling corpse of Leopold Hanser to the
white-faced Dieter Heydrich and smiled. It was a sick smile that in the
lantern-light contorted his face into a grotesque daemonic visage.
“Well, now we have our body,” he chuckled.
Let me tell you a little about the nature of that which you
would vulgarly call “magic”. I have never liked that word for it so poorly
describes the interplay of the energies of the otherworld upon our own physical
realm.
Those who are blessed with the ability to harness and
influence the flow and flux of these energies do not see the world as you mere
mortals do. Our minds exist in the everyday world of shadows and the blazing
eldritch world of the ethereal at the same time. This is true of all wizards,
including those who practise the lore of death.
The malevolent energies employed by the Dark Art are easily
the most dangerous form of sorcery but some would also say the most potent.
Certainly it is the great adversary of the noblest most pure form of the Ars
Magicae. But do not misunderstand me: the Dark Art is also, at its height, pure.
It is the pure antithesis of High Magic, being the most purely corrupt and
debased. For its energies are spawned by the raw power that spills from the rent
in reality, at the top of the world in the forsaken wastes of the North.
Necromancy itself then is the distillation of the energies
that are released upon the death of all living things. It combines the sorcerous
power of the Dark with those same supernaturally generated energies. It is borne
on the eldritch currents that blow across the world, in the wind that the
pathetic spiritualist mediums of the Amethyst Order call Shyish and to which
they give the symbol of the reaping scythe.
Therefore it is inextricably linked to the dead and where
they can be found. Hence certain damned places become saturated with death
energies: graveyards, charnel houses, the executioner’s scaffold, crossroad
gibbets, even the barrows of the ancient tribes who once held dominion over the
lands of what the upstart Karl-Franz now considers to be his Empire. At its most
extreme, whole regions can soak up such concentrations of this malevolent
paranormal power.
I speak of course of Mousillon in far Bretonnia, which is
called Mousillon the Damned. I speak of the Blighted Marshes that lie north of
the Tilean Sea in the shadow of the Irrana Mountains, of the desert kingdoms of
the dead south of mystical Araby. And of course I speak of the tainted County of
Sylvania, that accursed province of the leech-lords, where it is forever night
and where none sleep easy in their beds when the wolves gather. In such places
as these, where it is easier to summon the powers of death to do one’s bidding,
an enchanter might more readily work his dire sorcery.
But of course death and the dead can be found everywhere,
just as Morr holds the whole world in his cold grip and ultimately every living
thing must submit to him. So the necromancer has dominion wherever he chooses.
Autumn arrived in an amber rush of turning foliage and
falling leaves, the air damp and smoky, laden with the compost aroma of rot.
Erntezeit found the plague at its height in Bögenhafen.
Festivals such as the infamous Pie Week of the Mootfolk, which the halfling
community of the town would usually have celebrated with much merry-making and
copious food consumption for a full eight days at the start of the month, passed
without being marked. The town’s population had been ravaged by the remorseless
plague, with fully half the population succumbing to its pox-ridden touch. This
number included almost a third of the halfling community. The survivors of that
hardy folk had already left the damned human town to return to the Moot many
leagues away to the east and south.
The indiscriminate killer that was the black pox had cut down
all manner of people, regardless of age, social class or gender. Young men in
their prime were buried beside babes-in-arms, streetwalker girls beside
merchant-lords. Councillors, scholars, tradesmen and rat-catchers; all had been
taken by the hungry disease.
Men had deserted from the watch and were now surviving as
desperate outlaws in the forests of the Reikwald. The Schaffenfest fairground
had been abandoned long ago and was now littered with the scavenger-savaged
corpses of livestock that had succumbed to the plague just as the citizens of
the town had. Food waste rotted in the streets in festering piles, filling the
air with noxious vapours. Bonfires were set in the streets to try and purify the
air and mask the stench of death and decay that permeated everywhere. But the
fires only served to make the river-mists even thicker, lending them a jaundiced
tinge, as if the fog itself was tainted, its vaporous tendrils infecting the
market town all over again.
Rats gathered, and some townsfolk, whose minds had run mad in
the face of what they had seen happen to their neighbours, friends and loved
ones, claimed to have seen rats as big as men scuttling through the empty,
smog-shrouded streets, reemerging from the sewers at nightfall, walking on
their, hind legs like men.
But such wild rumours and the desertion of the watch troubled
not the two morbidly obsessed apprentices. In reality, the disaster that was
steadily befalling the town was proving to be a blessing to Dieter and his
accomplice Erich.
The black pox had made whole areas of the town veritable
no-go areas, including the docks. No barges stopped in Bögenhafen anymore. The
town lay under a pall of sickness and death. The boats which had been abandoned
at their jetties had long ago become breeding grounds for rats, unloaded cargoes
of foodstuffs rotting where they lay, fine bundles of cloth from Altdorf
plundered by the vermin to line their nests.
With the docks and warehouses of the Ostendamm abandoned,
Dieter and Erich were able to continue their clandestine work with even less
fear of being troubled by the watch, or indeed anyone else in spite of the fact
that a murder had been committed. There was no one there to discover it.
At first Dieter had panicked, expecting the watch to come
looking for the missing Leopold, sent on the instructions of his masters at the
physicians’ guild. However, he soon realised that during the current health
crisis no one would come looking for him. Dieter doubted that he would even be
missed. If any of those few remaining did question his whereabouts, they would
doubtless assume that he too had become another statistic of the plague’s death
toll.