Necromancer

by Jonathan Green - (ebook by Undead)

  Leopold remained calmly where he was, crouched by the bed that he might treat the open sores.

  “That’s right, the guild of physicians.”

  Dieter looked at Leopold admiringly. He wished he had his friend’s confidence and charisma. But at least he had Leopold’s friendship.

  “A-are you doktors? C-can you cure the sick?”

  “Not doktors yet; apprentices. But we do try to help those who ail.”

  “C-can you cure a man of a lost s-soul?”

  Leopold and Dieter looked at one another uncomfortably. Dieter shivered, the skin on his arms prickling with gooseflesh. Was it just him or had the temperature in the damp cell dropped perceptibly?

  “I-I was an apprentice, once.”

  Dieter fixed the madman with his own inquisitive gaze. “At the physicians’ guild?” he asked.

  “Y-yes. That’s right. At the g-guild. Until…” Anselm trailed off.

  “Until what?” Dieter pressed.

  “Until. N-no, I can’t say. M-mustn’t say.” Anselm drew his legs up, out of Leopold’s tending reach, and started to rock backwards and forwards on his cot. “No, mustn’t say. M-mustn’t say.”

  “What is it?” Leopold asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “No, can’t say. Mustn’t say. They’ll think you’re mad; mad, I tell you!” The lunatic was starting to babble.

  Leopold looked at his friend sharply. “What have you done?” he said accusingly.

  “I-I,” Dieter stammered in reply, wrong-footed by first the lunatic’s behaviour and now by his friend’s aggressive change of character, “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Mad, I tell you. You can’t tell them. Not about the doktor, not about him, not about what you saw. Physician, heal thyself!”

  Who was the madman talking to? To them? To himself? To someone else they couldn’t see, but whose presence Anselm could feel? He certainly wasn’t having trouble finding the words he wanted anymore.

  “Which doktor?” Dieter persisted. “A doktor at the guild?”

  “You can’t tell them about the doktor. Not about him. He’ll find out. He’ll know. He knows everything. He has your soul.”

  Dieter felt the chill even more strongly now. “Which doktor are you talking about?”

  “Stop this,” Leopold snapped.

  “Which doktor, Anselm?” Hearing his name used for the first time, Anselm looked up, directly at Dieter, fear brimming in his eyes once more.

  “Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?”

  Suddenly the bound lunatic threw himself bodily at Dieter, landing on the cold stone floor in a heap at his feet, grazing his knees and making his interrogator take his own startled jump backwards.

  “Cannot say, cannot say, cannot say. He knows everything, everything.”

  And then the lunatic’s incoherent babbling devolved into unintelligible screams, the screams of a terrified man who had lost his soul.

  Hearing the screams, the priestesses came running. The two apprentices were bustled out of the cell, the two priestesses who had taken their place slamming the cell door behind them. The door did not keep out the heartrending screams of the lunatic, however. They only stopped once the Shallyan nurses had been able to administer a sleeping draught distilled from the valerian herb.

  The poor man’s screams had unsettled the rest of the infirmary as they echoed down the draughty stone corridors of the temple-hospice. The great hall was alive with the anxious murmuring of the other patients and the priestesses who tended them.

  Leopold marched ahead of Dieter, his anger boiling off him, as they made their way to exit the Temple of Shallya. Then Sister Marilda was before them, like a suddenly materializing apparition in grey and white.

  “Sister,” Leopold acknowledged, ever the well-mannered gentleman despite his current mood.

  “Gentlemen,” Marilda said, her eyes cold, her lips unsmiling.

  Dieter slunk after his companion but then paused and addressed the priestess for the first time. “How did the lunatic Anselm come to be here? What was it that caused him to lose his mind?”

  “I told you not to listen to him,” the sister said sternly, her previously friendly demeanour gone. “Is it not enough that he is mad and in need of our prayers? I had thought you had come here to help those who suffered, not to make their suffering worse.”

  Then there was nothing more to be said. Dieter would not get the answers he was looking for here.

  But Dieter’s curiosity—that most dangerous of things—had been piqued. He was intrigued by the mysterious Anselm and was determined to find out more about him. After all, he had already experienced a darker side to the guild of physicians and wanted to know what could have made Anselm lose his mind so utterly. Perhaps part of him had to know that Anselm’s fate wouldn’t also be his. He would have to looks for answers elsewhere.

  Dieter knocked three times on the door to the guild master’s study. For a moment he heard nothing. Was he doing the right thing, coming here, effectively challenging the professor, especially after what had happened? Perhaps the professor wasn’t there at all. Then he heard the single command: “Enter.”

  Taking a deep breath Dieter opened the door and stepped into the room beyond, the memory of the last time he had been here still a livid scar in his mind.

  Professor Theodrus looked up. “Oh, Heydrich, it’s you,” he said uncomfortably. “I had thought we had come to… er… an arrangement, after the… er… incident.”

  “Yes, professor, we had and I-I’m sorry to trouble you,” Dieter looked down nervously at his feet. “B-but there was something I wanted to ask you.”

  “What is it you want?”

  Dieter clasped his hands tightly behind his back to stop them shaking. “I went to the Temple of Shallya today, to help the sisters in their work. I met a man there, a young man. His name was Anselm.”

  A barely-noticeable tic passed across the left side of Theodrus’ face.

  “Do you know him, or what caused him to lose his mind?”

  “Anselm? Anselm? I don’t recall the name. I don’t know who you could mean,” Theodrus blustered, but his cheeks flushed as he did so.

  “H-he said he was once a student of the physicians’ guild,” Dieter pressed on. “It could not have been that long ago. Should I ask one of the other senior members if they know of him?”

  “Close the door,” Theodrus said irritably.

  Dieter did as he was bid.

  “I remember now. Two years ago there was a student here by the name of Anselm: Anselm Fleischer. He was an embarrassment to the guild. It is not something I like to talk about.”

  Dieter considered his next words carefully. “He said a doktor had taken his soul.”

  The apprentice now saw the colour visibly drain from the master’s face. “You cannot believe anything the wretch says, he has lost his mind.”

  Dieter said nothing. The atmosphere in the guild master’s study was tense, the silence becoming unbearable. Dieter was about to excuse himself when Theodrus unexpectedly spoke again, releasing the tension in the room.

  “He was a promising student but he abandoned his studies at the guild, without warning; without giving a reason. One day he simply did not turn up to help Doktor Fitzgarten and he stopped coming to lectures.” An almost wistful look had come to the professor’s eyes. “Some of the other students believed that he had become apprentice to a doktor with dangerously progressive ideas, a doktor not licensed by the guild, one practising clandestinely in the town. More than this they did not know.

  “Then it was as if he had disappeared completely. Either he had left Bögenhafen or he was dead. Would that he had been.”

  “What?”

  “He was found months later by a barge captain and his son. He was roaming the Ostendamm, his clothes rags, his body filthy. All he would say, repeating it over and over, was, ‘Physician, heal thyself’.”

  “They brought him to the guild. Once we were able to get any sense
out of him it soon became apparent that his memory was like Wissenland chesse, full of holes. He could tell us that his name was Anselm but the name Fleischer meant nothing to him. He could not tell us how he came to be wandering the Ostendamm, nor did he know any of us at the guild, even though he knew he had studied there himself.”

  Dieter realised that he was staring at Theodrus aghast.

  “It truly is a tragic tale. Whatever had happened to him in the lost months had robbed him of his sanity. His wits had left him.”

  “So you sent him to the Temple of Shallya.”

  “He could not even clean up after himself anymore. The matter had become… difficult; the guild’s reputation might become tarnished. The guild makes an annual donation to the temple’s collection box for his keep.”

  Dieter did not know what to say. Each question answered merely raised a dozen more. “It is a truly tragic tale,” was all he could manage.

  “I don’t think you need mention this to any of the other apprentices, do you?”

  “N-no, professor.”

  “Very good. We have an understanding again then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, will there be anything else?”

  “No, professor.”

  This consultation was most definitely over.

  It was on Aubentag, the seventeenth day of Pflugzeit, that the news reached Dieter that his father was dying.

  On that day the sky was the grey of a burial shroud, with the threat of rain never fulfilling its promise. The message found him at the guild at noon, the messenger having been pointed in that direction by Frau Keeler. It was written in his sister’s hand and uncharacteristically brief. Things were dire indeed.

  Conflicting emotions raged through Dieter as he bundled his notebooks into his scrip, along with several jars of herbs and treatments he had helped produce. Then he excused himself from Doktor Hirsch’s company. He knew that he had to return home to Hangenholz immediately. It was his duty. His dear sister Katarina needed him. His father was dying. He only hoped he would reach Hangenholz in time.

  In the corridor outside Hirsch’s chamber Dieter collided with Leopold Hanser.

  He had not seen Leopold since the incident at the Temple of Shallya. They had hardly spoken after leaving the temple. Leopold had seen a new side to his friend, that day, and it was not a side he had liked.

  As a consequence Dieter had kept himself more and more to the lodging house in Dunst Strasse or the guild, preferring to move about the town by daylight and even then where the streets were busy and crowded. Dieter still felt vulnerable travelling alone, following his interrogation at the hands of Brother-Captain Krieger.

  “I’m sorry,” Dieter said, picking up his dropped scrip.

  Leopold saw the look in his friend’s eyes. “Dieter, what’s the matter?” he asked, genuine concern softening the words.

  “It’s my father. He’s dying.”

  Leopold gasped and looked crestfallen. “Then it is I who am sorry.”

  Dieter returned briefly to his lodgings to collect a change of clothes and his travelling cloak, retrieve his full purse from its hiding place behind a loose brick in his garret room, and to leave a message for Erich with Frau Keeler. The large woman gave him a motherly smile and touched his arm. Dieter drew away sharply, uneasy with the physical contact—no one had touched him like that since his mother died, other than his sister—but he managed to return her smile weakly.

  His scrip full, Dieter made his way to the Reisehauschen on the Bergstrasse, arriving just in time to buy passage on the last carriage of the day, leaving at two hours past noon, heading out on the Nuln road. He would have to change at the coaching stop of Vagenholt but he could still be in Hangenholz within three days, Morr willing.

  Hangenholz didn’t look any different to how he had last seen it, other than then, almost three months earlier, it had still been in the grip of winter. Now the snow was gone from the fields, replaced by healthy stalks of oats and barley, and the iron-hard frosts had gone, leaving the packed earth of the road softer underfoot. But the steeple of the chapel still showed over the thatched roofs of the houses, the backdrop of the woods behind, and the mill with its slow-turning waterwheel by the bridge before the village. Beyond them all atop the blasted tor of Raven’s Crag was the ruined tower that watched over the village like some sinister sentinel.

  Dieter paused as he approached the Highwayman’s Oak and looked up at the ancient, rusted cage creaking there from its thick knot of rope that was as black and mildewed as the gibbet cage was red and rusted, the lock and shackles corroded fast, never to be opened again.

  And from inside the cage the grinning corpse face of Old Jack, Black Jack, smiled down at Dieter.

  All the children of the village knew the mouldering skeleton. None were afraid of Jack for the skeleton was so unlike a living creature what was there to fear? A blackened, lichen-covered skeleton, slumped in its cage. He was like an old friend to them. It had been so long since the skeleton had been interred within the rusted cage that few in the village had ever known the corpse’s real name or why he had been left to die inside the sorrow cage of the gibbet. He had probably been just another highwayman—and given his title to the tree—captured and made to pay for his crimes in the harshest way possible as a warning to any other would-be bandits who would practise their wanton trade on the highways and byways of the Reikland.

  But to the children of Hangenholz Old Jack had almost been seen as their protector, who guarded the cluster of peasant holdings from the predations of the wider world. There were always rumours of darker things that roamed abroad in the forests of the northern lands of the Empire and from the south came stories of degenerate green-skinned goblins and their ilk raiding out of the Grey Mountains. Yet Hangenholz seemed to have been spared any such troubles for as long as any could remember. And to the children’s minds, that had been thanks to Old Jack and his watch over the one road into the village, rather than the tireless work of the roadwardens in the employ of the notoriously stringent local lord.

  There had been a gibbet there for many a year. The custom of carrying out hangings from the tall oaks in the woods dating from times long past—some said even harkening back to the practices of the pagan tribes people who had lived here before the time of Sigmar—had lent its name to the village. Without the hangings there would have been no village. Without the villains’ deaths there would have been no life for the people here.

  It lent an austere, matter-of-fact quality to the people who lived in Hangenholz, who even in the enlightened age of Magnus the Pious following the repulsion of the great incursion from the north, still offered their prayers at the chapel of Morr, rather than at the overgrown way-shrine of Sigmar.

  Rather than continue along the main trackway into the village, Dieter turned off the road onto a well-trodden footpath that cut across the fields of green barley. The shortcut was one he had often used as a child and he took it now, passing a crow-pecked turnip-headed scarecrow. He crossed the millstream via the footbridge downstream of the mill which carried the main road into the village to the square.

  The priest’s house stood to the left of the chapel, the quiet, painstakingly tended graveyard of Morr’s field spreading out within the circle of a low dry stone wall to the north-west. It had always been a house in mourning but it was never more so than now. Dieter was half aware of villagers about their morning business muttering to each other conspiratorially as they caught sight of the prodigal returning home, but he had other things on his mind. His sister was standing at the door to the house, her eyes red and puffy, the wrung out rag of a handkerchief clenched in her hands.

  Brother and sister embraced, and Katarina poured out her grief to Dieter. Then Dieter made his way directly to their father’s spartan room.

  Albrecht Heydrich lay unconscious under the blankets of his bed looking for all the world like a corpse laid out in its burial shroud. A cold hand squeezed Dieter’s stomach whilst hot tears stung his
eyes. Whatever else he might be feeling, this old man was his father and as the priest’s son he had a duty to the failing old man. But more than that Dieter was an apprentice physician now, a doktor in the making, and Albrecht Heydrich, priest of Morr, was his patient.

  Dieter ministered at his father’s bedside for two days, forgoing food and rest. In all that time his father—his patient—did not regain consciousness, no matter what manner of herbal concoction or remedy the physician’s apprentice tried. It was on the third day that Albrecht Heydrich gave up his personal struggle with the god of death, and died.

  For those three days Albrecht had been able to say nothing. Dieter simply said goodbye.

  That night, Dieter laid his father’s body in the mortuary chapel himself, yet as he looked at the corpse lying there on the mortuary slab of the chapel it was not his father he saw, but his mother. He kept vigil himself, falling asleep on the cold stone floor before the chime of midnight, huddled in a black cowled robe that had been his father’s.

  Engels Lothair arrived the next morning from Gabelbrucke to the news that the old priest had passed on into Morr’s realm himself at last. The news was not unexpected. He came to the mortuary chapel to find that his services were not required. Dieter had already prepared his father’s body for burial, washing it with herbs and anointing it with holy oils, knowing the ceremony as if he had trained as a priest of Morr himself, having seen his father carry it out a hundred times; it was as second nature to him. But then he had been surrounded by funerary rites and customs his whole life up to the age of eighteen. He was, as Engels Lothair said his father’s son.

  All that remained was for Engels to bless the body before its interment in the cold ground of Morr’s field. Josef Wohlreich, Katarina’s elderly suitor, dug the grave.