Necromancer

by Jonathan Green - (ebook by Undead)

  For a moment, frozen images of that fateful night, when he’d gone too far into the dark, flashed through his mind. He felt a tingle of power again at the memory but at the same time the bitter taste of bile rose again in the back of his throat as he saw what he had drawn in such macabre, surgically precise detail.

  With a thought he suppressed the dark power crackling within him. He had put his dark obsession, those black and deep desires, behind him now.

  When he returned to Dunst Strasse Dieter was surprised to see a ragged wretch of a boy, his pallid purple skin blotched with red rosettes of sores, standing at the door to the lodging house, a letter in his hand. Dieter took the letter from the boy with his own gloved hands. He had taken to wearing gloves to guard against contamination, just in case.

  He immediately knew something was wrong when he saw that his name and address were not written in his sister’s hand but one much less used to writing. He did not wait to read the letter in the privacy of his own chamber but tore it open at once.

  It was brief and to the point, and its few words chilled Dieter to the bone.

  Herr Heydrich

  Your sister Katarina is sick. Come at once.

  Yours in the faith of Morr,

  Josef Wohlreich

  Under a sky the colour of wet slate, Dieter paused beneath the Highwayman’s Oak and looked across the fallow fields towards the village of Hangenholz. After five frustrating days of travel, there being little coach traffic on the roads in time of plague, he was home once more. Massing thunderheads chased scudding billows of cloud across the sky, like wolves running down sheep.

  Hangenholz still looked just as it always had. Old Jack’s gibbet cage creaked in the branches of the Highwayman’s Oak above him in the bitter breeze. The woods that gave the dour village its name were dappled gold and ruddy bronze, the charcoal marks of branches black against the parchment of the sky.

  Beyond the trees, the ruined tower atop the Raven’s Crag escarpment continued its silent vigil of the village, but it seemed to Dieter that it had been most negligent in that duty. Ragged-winged birds circled the hill to which they had given their name, their croaking caws barely audible on the breeze.

  Turning off the road again to cross the denuded fields, Dieter heard a dolorous sound that froze the blood in his veins. The lonely tolling of the chapel bell drifted to him across the bleak landscape. It could mean only one thing. The bell was rung when someone had died, marking their passing from the mortal world to Morr’s twilight domain.

  Dieter ran. He passed the scarecrow, barely noticing that it was a turnip-headed imitation of a man again, and bounded over the footbridge across the millstream into the village.

  The black pox had come to Hangenholz.

  As he ran, Dieter was dimly aware of red crosses painted on the doors of other houses, as well as the smoky pyres burning in the streets where the infected dead had been cremated on the order of Notary Krupster, seeing as how Hangenholz was now without a priest of Morr to bless the bodies.

  Dieter saw Josef Wohlreich standing in the porch of the chapel, a cloth tied over his mouth, ringing the bell, and saw the tears streaming down his face as he turned, hearing Dieter’s pounding steps. Ignoring the fresh cross daubed on the door of his own home, and the risk of infection, Dieter burst into the priest’s house, running up the stairs to his sister’s room three at a time.

  At the threshold of her room he paused for a moment that seemed to stretch out into an eternity of heart-rending agony, seeing Katarina lying there on her bed under the thin sheet already covering her like a shroud. Her skin was the colour of purest driven snow, her hollow-eyed countenance almost peaceful. He would never gaze into her limpid brown eyes again.

  Wailing, Dieter threw himself on his knees at her bedside and gathered her up in his arms, hugging her cold, slight form to him, sobbing into the emaciated hollow of her neck.

  Then he lay down on the cold sheets next to her, brushing the hair out of her eyes and telling her that he would always take care of her.

  And that was how Josef Wohlreich found him an hour later.

  “She passed away this morning,” he said flatly.

  “Was she alone?” Dieter asked.

  “No, I was with her.”

  “Then thank you for that,” Dieter said. “I could not have bared it if she had gone on into Morr’s kingdom without someone who loved her at her side.”

  His tears were spent for now. He might be a doktor in the making but there was no remedy that he could prescribe for his grief.

  He did for her what he could; what he had done for their father. He washed Katarina’s body with herbs and, after anointing it with holy oils, dressed her in a plain cotton nightdress for a shroud. And he blessed her, although he was unsure whether his blessings meant anything anymore.

  As he kept his lonely vigil in the Chapel of Morr, with Katarina’s body lying on the bier before the pillared gateway of the holy shrine, a garland of white frostflowers in her hair, Dieter was at war with his emotions and with his god.

  When he looked upon Morr’s gateway in the chapel he felt nothing but bitterness in his heart. There was a hole in his being where Morr had once dwelt. At that moment he hated the god of death and dreams; he had taken all of Dieter’s family from him, despite his father’s loyal service. What had they done to deserve this? He knew what he was thinking was heresy but he cared not.

  He was wracked with grief and guilt. He had been too late to save his devoted sister. He had been too late to even say goodbye. He remembered her as he had last seen her, months ago at the end of Pflugzeit. He suddenly remembered that her seventeenth birthday had been only two days away.

  The one person in the whole world who had really known what it had been like for him growing up in Hangenholz—the ostracised child of the priest of Morr—because she had gone through it too, was gone. She had been the only one who had shown him any love since his mother died when he was only five years old. And, had he but known it, she had been the one who had kept his darker, more morbid tendencies in check.

  Had he brought this fate upon his sister, by replying to her letter? Had the messenger who had carried his missive to Hangenholz already been infected with the merciless disease? Was that what had happened? Why had this insane disease taken her and not him, he who was so much more deserving of its dark ministrations?

  He had been unable to save his father because he lacked the appropriate skills, he was convinced of it. But there was a way he could make amends for bringing about his sister’s demise. He had the skills that could bring her back! Even if his powers were born of darkness, how could they produce something evil if they were put to the service of good, brought to bear with only the best of intentions and honest love in his heart?

  He would not let the cremation pyres have her, nor the cold, unwelcoming earth of Morr’s field. He would resurrect her.

  Beyond the corrupted signifiers of the plague, there was hardly a mark on her. She had only died that morning, and she had died of natural causes rather than in violent circumstances. She would return with her wits intact, free of the madness of the undead Leopold Hanser had suffered, he was sure of it. Leopold’s body had been spoiled by days of decomposition. Katarina’s was not. She would be whole again.

  At the final chime of midnight, Dieter carried his sister out of the chapel and back into her own home. She was no burden: it was as if she weighed nothing at all.

  Laying her peaceful corpse out on the table in the dining room of the house, Dieter stoked up the fire and began his preparations. Two guttering candles had been lit in sconces around the room and Dieter had inscribed dark sigils that seem to squirm before the eye in the polished surface of the tabletop. His one surviving notebook lay open on the table at Katarina’s feet, its pages crinkled but dry.

  Reaching out over Katarina’s body, Dieter began to shape the air above his sister’s corpse, making the same gestures of conjuration he had seen Drakus make and that he himself had pe
rformed on that dreadful night almost a month before. He began to chant, the words revealed before him within the charred, water-damaged pages of the notebook.

  The Brauzeit wind beat against the walls of the house, rattling the windows in their frames and sending the flickering candlelight into a frenzied dance. The air thickened. The temperature dropped.

  Dieter continued to chant. He could hear chattering laughter echoing as from another room in the house. The darkness drew in, shadows running like quicksilver across the walls. What little light there was dimmed still further.

  An insistent buzzing, like the drone of flies inside his skull, rose in Dieter’s ears. Leopold’s Hanser’s face, a lifeless, rotting mask, loomed into view in his mind’s eye.

  Katarina’s hair began to stream out around her head, fluttering with frostflowers, teased by some unseen, esoteric wind.

  In mid-flow Dieter stopped chanting and picking up the book, in one fluid motion hurled it into the grate of the fireplace behind him with a scream of pent-up grief and rage. He would not do this to his beloved sister. He would not consign her to such a blasphemous fate. He could not do that to the one person he had loved in this world since his mother’s death thirteen years before.

  The book burst into flame at once, the fire in the grate rising to become a roaring inferno, so that Dieter had to shield his face from its intense white heat. In only a minute the book was reduced to ash and glowing embers that were sent swirling up the chimney on the rising thermals. The fire, having raged so fiercely and so intensely, had burnt itself out.

  Dieter collapsed on the floorboards of the pitch-black dining room and sobbed himself into a deep and mercifully dreamless sleep.

  On the day of her seventeenth birthday, Katarina Heydrich was interred in the cold ground of Morr’s field, next to her mother and father.

  There was no sign of Engels Lothair this time, so Dieter and Josef saw to the burial themselves. Few dared come to the plague village.

  “Lord Morr,” Dieter whispered under his breath as Josef cast the first shovelfuls of earth over Katarina’s coffin, “although I am sure I am beyond your forgiveness now, I pray nonetheless that you take your devoted child Katarina into your kingdom and guard her soul until the crack of doomsday.”

  The bitterness he had harboured in his heart for the god of death had gone, to be replaced by penitent regret. The plans of gods were far beyond the comprehension of mortal man.

  The day after the funeral, Dieter walked alone through the oak woods beyond the village where he and Katarina had played together as children, seeking solace where the Chapel of Morr could offer none to his troubled soul. It was here beneath the spreading oak canopy that the Heydrich children had escaped their strange, strained lives for a while, escaping into worlds of their own imaginings, of noble knights and sorcerous maidens, of monsters and magic, even, ironically, acting out the parts of witch hunter and witch.

  He trod the woodland paths, his boots squelching through the sodden leaf mulch covering the ground in a sludgy layer. He eventually emerged at the foot of Raven’s Crag tor and the blasted tower that stood atop it, a mile and a half from the village. It was said that there were dungeons beneath the ruin but the roof had fallen in long ago and buried the entrance to them. It was just a dark stone shell now.

  To the west the river ran past the limits of the tillable pastures into peaty marshland. To the north, beyond the trees in the shadow of the Skaag Hills was the site of an ancient battle, fought between the primitive tribes people who had also dotted the landscape hereabouts with their burial mounds and pagan tumuli shrines.

  It felt, to Dieter, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In fact he had not realised that he had been feeling on edge for so long. For the first time in months he felt that he was free of the curse of his unnatural “gift” the malign Doktor Drakus had awoken within him.

  With the burning of the last of his books, months of study—the labour of the best part of a year of his life—had literally gone up in smoke. And it had taken the death of his dear sister for Dieter to realise that his practice of the dark arts should be put to rest with her.

  No matter how tragic and momentous these two events were, and no matter what feelings of guilt and sadness they might provoke, Dieter could at last rest and recuperate from all the physical, mental and emotional stress he had endured in recent months, safe in the knowledge that he had at least conquered the darkness within himself, the darkness that had always been there, waiting for an outlet.

  It was as if he had faced one last test on the way to proving that he was ready to be redeemed and, although it had come at the ultimate cost, he had prevailed. He had become used to losing people in the past and he would acclimatise to the inevitability again now.

  Perhaps he was destined to achieve great things in the name of Shallya, or even Morr, after all. As well as having trained for some months as a physician and displayed some natural aptitude in that area he also considered himself to be suitably qualified to go into the service of Morr. He had the skills he had inherited from his father. And having seen the other side of death first hand that year could only help him better understand what, as a priest of Morr, he would be expected to guard against. After all, as his father had once said, that which does not kill you only serves to make you stronger.

  Of one thing he was certain, it was time to start a new life, away from the decadent corruption of Bögenhafen. He called to mind all that had come to pass in the nine months since he had secured a place at the physicians’ guild there and left Hangenholz to pursue his studies. Those memories left an ashen taste on his tongue now.

  Being at home, in the place of his birth again, had made Dieter see sense at last and secured his change of heart. He was decided. He would return home to Hangenholz permanently and find what course his life would take there. What little he had left in the world that mattered to him was here, in Hangenholz. He would set up as a doktor, perhaps even train as a priest of Morr, and earn the people’s respect and acceptance.

  But before he could do that there were some loose ends he needed to tie up elsewhere. What was done was done, but it was time he made amends for his transgressions.

  It was time to return to Bögenhafen.

  It was time to confess.

  KALDEZEIT

  Down Among the Dead Men

  I have committed all manner of evils in my unnaturally extended life as a necromancer, but the irony is that I was made a necromancer by the misguided actions of others.

  When Ernst Krieger accused me of being that dire spectre the Corpse Taker at our first meeting, I was, as yet, innocent of any crime. If that accursed witch hunter had put me to the ordeal of Madame Rack and inevitably found me unjustly guilty, I would have been burnt at the heretic’s stake and died as an innocent, instead of that wretch Anselm Fleischer.

  But the true greatest irony is that if the irrational brother-captain had had me put to death, I would not have lived to become the very thing that the witch-hunting Templars of Sigmar set out so puritanically to out destroy. I would not have become the very thing that Krieger had accused me of being.

  So I ask you, who was it that drove me to commit so many unspeakable acts of depraved wickedness? Who was it that made me evil? And what is one man’s traitor but another man’s redeemer anyway?

  The carriage rumbled along the Nuln road under a bruised grey sky. Kaldezeit had arrived in the Reikland, bringing with it near freezing temperatures and lending the icy air the sharp cold smell of death. Ground mist covered the swathes of yellowed meadow that lay beyond the skeletal trees lining the road. Following the bitter frosts of Kaldezeit, in all too little time Bögenhafen would enjoy its first falls of Ulriczeit snow.

  But the stagecoach’s only passenger was oblivious to all of this. Dieter Heydrich’s mind was on other things.

  It had taken him two weeks to tie up his affairs in Hangenholz and the nearby market-hub of Karltenschloss so that everything would be read
y for him when he returned from Bögenhafen. Back in Hangenholz, Dieter had begun to treat those for whom the plague had been a life-threatening condition. And his patients had started to get better. He had begun to feel part of the community there for the first time in years. He had also slept well for the first time in as long as he could remember, his dreams no longer haunted by the restless dead.

  With the black pox all but eradicated in Hangenholz, Dieter had set off for Bögenhafen for the last time, on the thirtieth day of Brauzeit. The coaching companies were still not able to run a full service and besides, business was slow. But eventually Dieter had persuaded a number of different drivers to carry him on short legs of the journey so that on the afternoon of Wellentag, the second day of Kaldezeit, he came within sight of the market town’s ominously looming walls again.

  He remembered the excitement he had felt when he had first seen those towering battlements. Now the sight left him feeling cold, with a bitter taste in his mouth. There was nothing here for him now.

  Dieter could not return to the guild; too many questions would be asked. Too many people knew too much or had too great an interest invested in the one they had called the Daemon’s Apprentice. And that was assuming that he would be welcome there; that Professor Theodrus would accept his prodigal protégé back into the fold. No, too much water had flowed under that bridge which Dieter had then quite successfully burnt.

  Dieter still had what was left of his father’s money but there was no place for him in Bögenhafen. Brother-Captain Krieger was still securely ensconced within the templar chapter house, as far as he knew, and he would always be watched.