by Rob Sanders
CHAPTER III
‘The corn is cut and the crops are reap’d.
Taal is praised and the gathering heap’d.
Thanks are given for the kindly skies,
And that fruit was not taken before it was ripe.’
– The Reaper’s Danse (Anon)
Dempster’s Rock
Nordland
Vigil der Erntezeit, IC 2399
Hieronymous Dagobert’s footfalls were heavy on the scullery steps. The kitchen fire was roaring but there was nothing cooking on it. The priest was silent as he reached the basement flags.
‘Father,’ a voice came, just audible above the roar of the fire. It was tender with age. Young, fragile and broken. More of a devastated whisper than a voice. The word rattled off into a coughing fit, which prompted the priest to close his eyes. ‘Hieronymous, is that you?’
Dagobert stood with his broad back to the child. His hand had formed a fist. He bit at his knuckle absently. His eyes were rheumy and his cheeks flushed but Lady Magdalena of the Salzenmund Hospice had assured him that it wasn’t the pestilence and that he was merely overwrought in his tending to the child. She could not say the same of the boy, however. Worse, the priestess of Shallya told him that the disease was not known to her or her order and the best she could do was make him comfortable for the coming end.
‘Father?’
‘I’m here, my son,’ Dagobert assured the young boy. He opened his misery-clutched eyes and walked to the scullery side where a pot of medicinal tea had been cooling. Ravenswort and ground Staffroot, Magdalena had told him. Something to help the suffering. If taken in quantity, something to help the sufferer slip away. ‘You should take some more of your tea,’ Dagobert called over the fire. ‘As Lady Magdalena instructed.’ He picked up the fire-burnished pot and poured the foul-smelling infusion into a wooden mug. He stopped. His hand was shaking. The misty liquid sloshed about the cup. Dagobert slammed it back down on the tabletop. ‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘Sigmar forgive me. One more night.’ Leaving the concoction, Dagobert crossed the scullery to where he had positioned the boy’s bed before the fire.
‘Oh, Little Diederick,’ Dagobert said. The youngling looked terrible. A veritable corpse. He was shaking – his frame continually wracked by shivers that even the most furious fire failed to combat. Dagobert had called the boy Little Diederick, but for eight he had been quite tall and brawny. The pestilence, however, had wasted him to a husk. A field mouse could have lifted him from the bed. His young flesh was threaded through with a canker that opened up splits and welts that would not heal and in turn gave breed to a pox that had turned his skin to scab and scale. His fine, blond hair had fallen away and his sockets were bruised brown with corruption. The eyes within had clouded over and consigned the boy to darkness. Worst of all, a bloody and black treacle continually leaked from the corner of the youngling’s mouth, proceeding from both his chest and his stomach, making it difficult for him to breathe and almost impossible for him to eat.
Despite the boy’s myriad sufferings, the priest hardly ever heard him complain. He had a strength of body and mind that Dagobert both admired and dreaded. The more Little Diederick fought and the longer he endured the more he would suffer. Lady Magdalena told Dagobert that despite the boy’s undeniable spirit, he was finished. Dagobert had wept before the priestess. He had raised Little Diederick at the temple. They had not been apart for eight years and Dagobert – who had no children of his own – discovered that the boy had brought meaning to his life he had not expected. The act of charity in saving him that fateful, moonlit night and taking him in had turned into an act of love. He was both a spiritual and substitute father to the child. He had named him, for Sigmar’s sake. The truth was that the tears Dagobert shed were tinged with relief as well as sorrow. It was almost over for the poor boy. A day at most, the priestess had given him. Then she had given Dagobert the tea to ease both the boy’s suffering and the way to Shallya’s bosom.
‘Father,’ Little Diederick wheezed. ‘Am I dying?’
‘Yes, my boy,’ Dagobert answered. The words came fast and easier than he expected. ‘Not long… Not long. Your trials will soon be at an end and you will be free. Do you suffer, Diederick?’ Dagobert asked.
‘I don’t feel much,’ the boy said. Dagobert nodded. Lady Magdalena’s concoction had been successful in cushioning her patient from the worst of his agonies. ‘I’m frightened,’ the boy admitted.
Dagobert took the small, silver hammer he wore about his fat neck in reverence to his God-King – the emblem of his holy office – and draped it about the child’s neck. The boy didn’t even feel it.
‘Don’t be,’ Dagobert said. ‘I’m here. I’ll always be here – at your side.’
The boy was still shivering, despite the fire. Dagobert sidled around the bed and lay down behind Diederick. He put his arm about the child, trying to warm him further. The pair of them lay still awhile, staring into the raging kitchen fire. Minutes passed. The boy’s breathing grew increasingly laboured. Dagobert held him through a savage coughing fit that shook the delicate child until he was almost insensible.
As he rescued his breath and returned to solemn silence, Dagobert spoke.
‘Diederick?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘Do you think you might ever find it in yourself to forgive me?’ the priest asked, his voice strained with emotion.
‘For what?’ Little Diederick hissed, his words reedy.
‘This is my fault,’ Dagobert admitted. ‘I don’t think you caught this pestilence in the forest or from the river. I don’t think a visitor to the temple brought it to us. And neither does Lady Magdalena.’
‘What’s wrong with me?’ the child asked with a chilling directness. Dagobert turned his eyes from the blinding flicker of the fire.
‘I sent you for the books,’ he told the boy. ‘I was distracted. I left the vault door open. I never thought that…’ The priest caught himself. ‘These things are all my fault.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Diederick said, moving his head, causing more black ooze to roll from the corner of his mouth.
‘The vault is a special place,’ Dagobert said. ‘A secure place, where I am required to keep special things.’
‘Special things?’ Little Diederick asked.
‘Tomes. Manuscripts. Works of great age.’
‘Books?’
‘Yes, but not the ones I sent you for. Those would never be found in such a place. The vault contains tomes of dangerous knowledge and ideas,’ Dagobert said. ‘Knowledge that can hurt people. Understanding for which the world will never be ready. Each temple has a vault of such heresies stored securely beneath the holy ground of its flagstones.’
‘Why do you keep such things, Father?’ Diederick asked, devolving once more into a horrible coughing fit. Blood, fresh and raw from the lungs appeared on the boy’s lips, prompting Dagobert to wipe it away with the tails of his priestly robe. Little Diederick appeared to be in greater discomfort. Every breath was an effort.
Dagobert thought on the question as the boy grew still once more.
‘In order to better protect ourselves from the enemies of Sigmar,’ the priest said, ‘and the God-King has many, we must know what they know. We study and translate them to know how the servants and darkness might be stopped. Sigmar entrusts such a solemn and hazardous task to a chosen few.’
‘Who?’ Little Diederick rasped.
‘His priests,’ Dagobert said. ‘His templar knights. You remember meeting Sieur Kastner, yes?’
‘Yes…’
‘He came searching for such a tome,’ Dagobert told him. ‘That was why the vault was open. You have to know, Diederick, it was a mistake. I would never have exposed you to such dangers intentionally.’
‘I never found the books you asked for,’ Diederick said.
‘But you found others,’ Dagobert pressed tautly.
‘Yes…’
‘Did you read them?’
‘I knocked over a pile,’ Diederick said, his face creasing with further pain and discomfort. ‘One lay open. I leant in to look. It was covered in strange symbols. I did not understand.’
‘Lady Magdalena and I found the toppled books in the vault,’ Dagobert said.
‘Does Lady Magdalena think I got this for reading one of the dangerous books?’
‘No, my child.’
‘Is Sigmar angry with me,’ Diederick said, bloody tears welling in the mist of his eyes. ‘For reading the book?’
‘No, Little Diederick,’ Dagobert told the boy, ‘he is not. The God-King could not be prouder of your hard work in the temple and in your studies. Lady Magdalena thinks that you might have breathed something in: some ancient pestilence or contamination. Something left there a long time ago by one of Sigmar’s enemies. The God-King is not angry with you. He is angry with me. I am the one to be punished.’
Diederick began to cough. This time it took several minutes to stop. Dagobert held him, lest the fragile boy shake himself to ruin. As they lay there, before the fury of the fire they both became still and silent.
‘Father?’ Diederick said, his voice but a strangled sigh.
‘Yes, my dear child?’ Dagobert dared to answer.
‘I forgive you,’ the boy mouthed.
The priest read the words on his dry, blackening lips. Tears rolled down the priest’s fat cheeks. He laid the child on his back. It was time.
‘The God-King waits for you,’ Dagobert told him.
‘There is something there,’ Diederick hissed. ‘In the darkness.’
‘It is He,’ Dagobert said. ‘Don’t be frightened. Go to him.’
The boy’s face contorted with sudden horror and disgust. ‘It’s not the God-King…’ Diederick said. The words were still on his lips as his last breath escaped him.
The Lord of All enjoys the songs, the chanting of children at play, holding hands and dancing around. They sing of flowers, of his plagues that sweep through the land and the ashes of bodies burned. They celebrate this life of death, for he is both the cause of their suffering and he who would save them from it. He defines the times with the pain and fear he brings into mortal lives. Though they would not know it, they sing and dance to the tune of the Great Pestilence’s calling.
He takes so many souls in this way. Like the harvest, they are weighed and measured. They are his tithe. His reward for the architecture of agony that is his contribution to their mortal failing.
Like the scythe, the Lord of All does not choose between the one stalk and the other. With so many souls feeding his eternal appetite for affliction and end, he will not miss the one stalk. Does the mill miss the single grain? The bread bereft of flour that dusts the floor with its forgotten bounty? The mouth the crumb that falls from the lip?
He will not miss the one soul unpromised to him. The one soul destined for more than his plague or pestilence. For this one grain re-planted will yield a reaper’s harvest. A celebration of death and suffering the like of which the world has never known. He will be a scourge, a disease all of his own. A plague from which the world will never recover. And so I release this soul from its suffering and send it back so that it might be a worm in the rotting carcass of the world. And not a carcass in itself.
CHAPTER III
‘The great and the good carry the same flaws as you and I.
They are just buried deeper or concealed with greater skill.
Accept this as truth. Though it is true also that such revelations are a fall from which we never truly recover.’
– Eugen Kufka, A History of the Empire v.XII
Holzbeck
Middenland
Jhardrung’s Eve, IC 2404
Oberon.
Diederick had always liked the horse’s name. It rang of nobility. The kind of muscular majesty the monstrous, black stallion projected in its every step. Diederick would know. The page had one of the horse’s goliath hooves between his thighs. He held it still, placing a new shoe on the foot. He was overdue a change. As page to Sieur Kastner’s squire Nils, it had been Diederick’s honour to attend the templar’s horse.
Placing the shoe – that Diederick had had specially made by Holzbeck’s only farrier to accommodate the stallion’s size – he positioned the first nail. The shoeing hammer made easy work of the hoof, sending the nail out of the hoof topside, where Diederick expertly bent and twisted it secure. As he went about his work, his hammer pendant swung like a pendulum from the chain about his neck. It had been given to him by Father Dagobert upon being appointed as Sieur Kastner’s page, so that Sigmar watched over him. Grabbing the hammer he held it to stillness. The coolness of the Middenland night crept into the blacksmith’s stable. Diederick felt the chill through the wool of his hood and tabard. It was a patched cast-off that had formerly belonged to Nils. Diederick had inherited both the position and the ragged uniform. With both blacksmith and farrier enjoying the night’s festivities at the Three Ways Inn across the road, Diederick and Nils were alone and without the blaze of the forge to warm them.
‘Nils,’ Diederick said. The squire ignored him. ‘You cold, Nils?’
‘I am,’ Nils admitted, going to work with cloth and oil at the broad, heavy blade of Sieur Kastner’s greatsword Terminus. It was a magnificent weapon. As tall as the squire cradling it. The weapon was ostentatious only in the shameless craft of its blade and the death-dealing certainty of its cleaving edge – although you wouldn’t know it to watch Sieur Kastner hack at the unliving like a woodcutter or make a bludgeoned mess of forest-infesting goblinoids. The crusader blade had been in the Kastner family for generations – an heirloom passed from father to eldest son. The guard was inset with the bejewelled modesty of the Kastner family’s wealth. The blade itself was inscribed with the weapon’s honourable name – earned by Sieur Kastner’s great-great grandfather a hundred years before at the side of Magnus the Pious. Along its holy length it bore the crafted design of the twin-tailed comet that heralded the Heldenhammer’s coming. The pommel was a simple metal orb, into which the Imperial cross was crafted, honouring the Kastner family’s service in the name of Sigmar. The weapon gleamed in the lantern-light of the stable. Nils was careful not to leave the greasy marks of his fingertips on the blade. He rubbed the metal with a cloth, holding it up to the light – his study of the weapon fastidious to the point of obsession. Such imprints would lead to corrosive blemishes, the like of which the squire had suffered for previously at his master’s hand. ‘Just busy yourself with your work,’ Nils told the page. ‘The burn of honest labours will warm you to your bed tonight.’
The young Diederick raised an eyebrow. It sounded like something Sieur Kastner would say in one of his more knightly moments but coming from Nils sounded like a hustle. Since there were three more shoes to be fitted and only the filthy straw of the stable waiting for him, Diederick found the invitation a hollow one. As the page finished the first shoe and allowed the steed’s great hoof to fall, he walked up the beast’s silky, black flank. He patted it softly, noticing the animal flinch a little as he reached the whipping scars on his hindquarters.
‘Good Oberon,’ Diederick said. ‘That’s it boy – just three more to go.’
The night air did little to bother Oberon. He was a Sollander. A pureblood charger from the Upper Soll Valley – although Diederick suspected that in reality he had more than a little Bretonnian Draught in him. As a knight’s destrier he was tall and strong. A wall of darkness and muscle standing next to the page.
The inn door opened and the gaiety of fiddle, raucous song and empty steins slammed on tables briefly intruded on the muddy road. It was Jhardrung’s Eve, the turning of one year to another. The entirety of Holzbeck had crammed its
elf into the Three Ways – so called because the inn sat on a well-travelled junction between the City of the White Wolf, Grimminhagen and the Old Forest Road that took the unwary through the dark and dangerous Drakwald. Diederick found himself standing at the stable door as Nils went on with his oiling of the sword.
Without his plate and shield – also waiting for Nils’s efforts with cloth and oil – Sieur Kastner cut an unimpressive figure. If it hadn’t have been for the worn finery of his garments or the dwindling weight of his purse, he could have been trader, cleric or blacksmith. The strength and skill of a warrior’s body was long hidden beneath a small mountain of fat. Chicken scraps from an earlier feast clung to grease-spots on the silk of his tent-like smock, while beer-froth sat in his greasy beard like the webs of busy spiders.
The templar clutched his prize for the night to his massive frame. One of the innkeeper’s buxom daughters. The innkeeper of the Three Ways wasn’t about to argue with a Knight of the Twin-Tailed Orb and might even have hoped that issue from such a union might bright him connections to the Kastner family and their estates in the Gruber Marches. The girl had plenty of fight in her, however. She pushed. She slapped. She bit at the templar’s fat, wandering fingers.
Too drunk to restrain her as intended and with festive indifference evident on his broad face, Kastner meandered through the filth and water pooling in the wheel-mulched road – the girl’s wrist held in the grip of one meaty fist. She hauled at the man mountain and as he hauled back, drawing her to him, he let his pudgy palms travel across her. More slapping and scraping at the templar’s face this time took him from a beer-fuelled daze to thunderous realisation. The palm of his hairy hand produced a stifled squeal from the girl and put her down in the quagmire. He blinked at her and a fat finger came up in warning but the innkeeper’s daughter was already up. Filthy rainwater cascaded from her dress as she slipped and skidded away from him. Her face was fearful but her eyes full of defiance. Diederick found a squalid inspiration in the girl’s determination. Pulling her drenched skirt-tails to her, she ran up the road, melting into the darkness. Kastner spat after the innkeeper’s daughter, shouting something unintelligible after her. As he shrugged his disappointment and disgust away he stumbled to one side, slipping down into a wagon-cut crevasse in the road. He floundered back the other way, his boot losing purchase and putting the templar down on one knee. Furious, the knight rumbled half-heard threats to himself before slapping the pooling waters in frustration.