Dieter felt physically sick. He had only encountered
Krieger’s like once before, eight years earlier, back in Hangenholz. The
villagers had only known the heavily cloaked and hooded stranger by the name
Kreuzfahrer but Dieter’s father, had told him the man’s profession.
Kreuzfahrer had arrived as dusk was falling one Nachgeheim
evening when the smoky autumn air was thick with the smell of decaying fallen
leaves and toadstool spores. He had made straight for the house of Old Gelda,
the village wise woman, and dragged her out into the village square. She was
accused of witchcraft and consorting with daemons.
Dieter still doubted the validity of the accusations to this
day but what made it worse was how the witch hunter had made everyone in
Hangenholz turn on Gelda, who had seen to all of their winter ailments and
delivered fully half the population of the village as midwife. In order to prove
themselves innocent of her corruption, the villagers had to profess the helpless
old woman’s guilt with ever-louder voices and more strident accusations.
Gelda, terrified tears streaming down her panic reddened
cheeks, had been unable to say anything in her own defence, Kreuzfahrer having
already cut out her tongue. Then, in front of his father’s chapel, Dieter had
watched the witch hunter tie Gelda to a fence post the blacksmith himself had
hammered into the ground, and had her burnt to death, even forcing the village
headman to put the blazing torch to the faggots piled around her decrepit body.
It was this experience alone that had given Dieter nightmares as a child more
than any warning tales of rat-headed men or brutish greenskin raiders ever had.
The rest of the village had suspected each other of all manner of heinous crimes
after Kreuzfahrer’s visit and as a result, certain families never trusted one
another again.
And now one like him had summoned Dieter and called him a
heretic!
Dieter dared not disobey the witch hunter. Feeling his blood
ran cold in his veins, and his heart beating its own rapid tattoo of panic, he
dragged his leaden feet towards the imposing figure of the Brother-Captain
Krieger.
Now Dieter could see Professor Theodrus forcing his way into
the library behind the towering witch hunter.
“This is preposterous! An outrage!” the guild master
blustered. “First you come here practically claiming that we are harbouring a
murderer and body-snatcher within our walls—”
“Where do you get the bodies for your studies?” the witch
hunter’s grim snarl of a voice interrupted.
“We are not barber-surgeons! We are physicians!” Theodrus
bridled. “And now I find you harassing one of our students as if he’s some
dangerous criminal!”
Before Dieter’s patron could reach them, Krieger had grabbed
Dieter roughly with a grip like an iron vice, clamping down on his arms and
holding them tight to his sides. Dieter could feel Krieger’s breath, hot and
rancid against his neck.
“Unhand this boy at once!” Theodrus’ face was flushed red
with furious indignation and barely-controlled rage, like a caged feral beast
struggling to free itself from beneath the professor’s usually composed
demeanour.
“Would you stop the work of the Sigmar’s own templar?”
Krieger challenged.
“I might have been foolish enough to let you in here in the
first place but I’m not that addle-brained!” Theodrus railed. “But might I
suggest that we continue this
discussion
behind closed doors.”
“You wish this interrogation to be carried out somewhere less
public?” Krieger fixed the guild master with his piercing icy stare. “Very well.
Where?”
“My study. This way.”
Dieter yelped in pain as the witch hunter grabbed him by the
arm and forced it up behind his back until he was sure he heard something snap
and pain stabbed through his elbow. Then he was frog-marched away.
Before he knew it, Dieter was being forced down into one of
the well-upholstered chairs in Professor Theodrus’ study. As the professor
closed the door behind them, a jostle of apprentices and guild servants already
packing the corridor behind them, the witch hunter took a coil of rope from his
belt and lashed both Dieter’s hands roughly to the arms of the chair. Dieter
winced and gritted his teeth as the hemp rubbed and cut into the thin flesh of
his wrists.
Then the questioning began.
“Where were you on the night of the first Wellentag of last
month? And on the seventh night of Nachexen? What brought you to Bögenhafen?”
Krieger’s constant challenges didn’t give Dieter enough time
to answer. Then the questions became more personal.
“Why did you leave… Hangenholz, was it? Why did you leave?
What guilty secrets did you leave behind you there? Has death always followed in
your wake? What of your father? What was it like having a priest of the
death-cult for a father?”
Someone’s tongue had obviously been loosened on meeting
Brother-Captain Krieger. Dieter wondered who had told the witch hunter about
him.
“Morr, preserve me,” Dieter gasped under his breath, panic
having gripped him fully.
“What? What was that?” Krieger turned on him. “Why not
‘Sigmar save me’? Was your father a heretic too? Did he teach you his heretical
ways?”
“No,” Dieter struggled. “It was never like th—”
“What were you doing on all those long, dark, lonely
evenings, whilst your father prepared the bodies of the dead for burial? I
expect you used to watch, didn’t you? Watch and learn? How did it make you feel
watching him strip the carcasses and wash them, anoint them, enshroud them? Did
you become just a little too interested? Morbidly fascinated even? How long have
you been practising occult heresies of the most abominable nature, raising the
dead by means of foul necromancy?”
The witch hunter clearly wasn’t interested in what this naive
country boy had to say. In Krieger’s mind, Dieter was already tried, found
guilty, and burning at the stake.
“What made you do it, eh? What drove you first to kill?”
“I… I didn’t k—”
“Did someone disturb you when you were stealing the
merchant’s body?”
“A merchant? I didn’t reali—”
“Was it the beggar Hubertus? Is that what happened to him?
Did you make him disappear? What did you do with the body? Did you throw it in
the Bögen? What did you do with the other bodies? Are you keeping them
somewhere? Do they keep you company in the squalid charnel house that you call
home?”
Spittle flew from Krieger’s lips into Dieter’s face as his
incensed interrogator leaned closer. Dieter said nothing now. He could say
nothing in the face of the witch hunter’s constant barrage of questions.
“I can have every house between here and the Langen Strasse
searched. But why don’t you just tell me where you’ve dumped them? What will
loosen your tongue? Shall I get out the thumbscrews or should I haul you back to
the temple to introduce you to Madame Rack?”
Dieter was stunned into silence. It was all happening so
quickly. To him the interrogation was passing in a daze, so traumatic was he
finding the experience. He had retreated back inside his shell of shyness. He
was a child again, back in Hangenholz, before his mother died, before his world
ended, before this!
He could well understand why innocent men confessed to all
manner of crimes. It wasn’t even just to make the incessant questioning stop.
After several hours of this, Krieger could probably make you believe all manner
of evils about yourself. And then there was the confessional of the torture
chamber where stronger wills than Dieter’s were broken as easily as a hammer
breaks an egg.
Dieter might have been cowed into silence, but Professor
Theodrus could still speak, and did, in the boy’s defence.
“This stops now!” the guild master roared, slamming his hands
down on the top of his desk.
Krieger rose, turning away from Dieter, his sapphire gaze
cold as a Mondstille night.
“Why do you defend this wretch?” the witch hunter said, his
voice as hard and cutting as a tempered steel blade. “Is it a sign of your own
guilt, perhaps?”
“This interrogation is a farce!” Theodrus bellowed. “I would
offer any member of this guild the same support in the face of such flagrant
lies and fraudulent accusations.”
“Unless they were proved to be a servant of darker powers, of
course.”
“Which Heydrich is not!”
“That is yet to be proved.”
“How can this boy be the Corpse Taker? He only arrived in
Bögenhafen at the beginning of Nachexen and the disappearances began as far back
as last Kaldezeit, as far as we are aware.”
“Bodies have gone missing since, and with increasing
regularity.”
“And there is nothing to suggest that these disappearances
are the work of anyone other than the Corpse Taker.”
Through the haze of the trauma of his experience Dieter was
gradually aware of a needling thought at the back of his mind. Professor
Theodrus seemed very well informed regarding the disappearances and the Corpse
Taker’s alleged crimes. What part had he played in these events?
He had been master of the physicians’ guild for a good number
of years and enjoyed the patronage of many of the market town’s most respected
noble families. There would be almost nowhere that he could not go within the
town and almost no piece of information that would not be accessible to him, one
way or another.
“And how could a youth of meagre means, who grew up in a
backwater Reikland village, be able to carry out what it is claimed the Corpse
Taker has done?”
“Theodrus, I came to this guild to gather information about
events that have beset this town that I might uncover the identity of this foul
carrion creature and hunt it down like the mongrel dog the malevolent fiend
undoubtedly is. And then I find this heretic skulking in your very midst.”
Krieger turned his crystal-sharp gaze back on the restrained
Dieter. “Consider this possibility,
professor.
Perhaps it is you who is
tutoring the apprentice in the ways of dark magic.”
“This is preposterous!” Theodrus’ face was the very picture
of fury. “I am calling an end to this farce right now. If you propose to
question this student any more, then you
had
better take him off to your
temple and you had better have some proof to back up your wild accusations. Or
do I need to remind you of this guild’s influence within Bögenhafen? Now untie
the boy at once!”
“Do not dare to threaten me, bloodletter,” the witch hunter
growled like a mastiff, a vein pulsing unpleasantly in his neck, “or I shall
take you in for questioning along with this wretch,” he said, half-pulling
Dieter out of his seat by the scruff of his robes.
“We are not sorcerers here, brother-captain!”
Ignoring Theodrus’ plea Krieger turned his chilling gaze on
Dieter again. “Do you realise, Heydrich, that for centuries the proscribed
punishment for the practise of this particular heresy was to be burnt at the
stake, in agonising torment?”
“I-I did know that, y-yes,” Dieter stammered. To be accused
of sorcery was still something that could shame a man, particularly a doktor of
physick.
Krieger brought his face even closer to Dieter’s, his eyes
wild, burning with the full fury of the retributive inferno. “And in my humble
opinion, it still should be. And what is the practice of medicine but one step
away from alchemy and that itself is but the first step on the path to the
damnation that the study of the magic arts brings. And you, a son of a priest of
the death-cult, making a study of the human body. It you ask me you are just a
little too well-informed about the frailty of the human form, but obviously not
well-informed enough, so you have to continue your study of anatomy by other
means.”
“Anatomy is not a subject taught by the guild of physicians,”
Theodrus angrily corrected the witch hunter. “As I thought I had already made
plain, we are not back-street barber-surgeons, we are members of the most
esteemed and venerable guild of physicians. We are men of medicine; men of
science.”
“And that in itself is dangerous heresy.”
“Shallya help me, I shall report you to the town council and
the elector count’s household myself and have the full might of his armoured
fist brought down upon your chapter house!”
For a moment neither the Sigmarite nor the guild master
spoke. Dieter saw the men exchange dagger-pointed stares. It was the
brother-captain who eventually broke the silence.
“I come from a long family line of witch hunters and warrior
priests, and we are proud of our heritage. My great-great-great grandfather
scoured Mordheim in the years following the devastation caused by the
comet-strike of the Hammer of Sigmar. Mark my words—Brother-Captain Ernst
Krieger
always
gets his man.”
It appeared that a stalemate had been reached but Dieter
wondered how long such a status quo would remain.
The witch hunter strode back to the chair to which Dieter was
bound. He pulled a gleaming knife from his belt and held it under Dieter’s nose.
“And if
you
are that man, I will have you
excommunicated from the bosom of the Holy Church of Sigmar and then I swear that
I will come after you and hunt you down!”
With one sharp motion the witch hunter cut Dieter’s bonds,
nicking the flesh of his arm in the process. Krieger turned on his heel to
leave. But before he left he had one last warning to offer.
“Remember, I’ll be watching you.”
And then he was gone.
Dieter sagged in the chair where he sat and threw up.
What is madness? Do you think that I am mad, one who would
damn his own soul by practising the black arts? And to what end? For a few more
decades of desperate decaying life? To become an outcast from the world of the
living when it is precisely an unbearable desire to live that has driven one to
study the proscribed rites of necromancy?