The sounds were louder out in the passageway. The monastery was a large, rambling building, too large for the few monks who inhabited it, and many of its rooms seemed to have been abandoned or unoccupied for quite some time. However, a few of the chambers at the far end were still occupied, and it was from these that the sounds appeared to be coming. Vido heard more moans and cries, but from behind one of the closer doors, he heard a chillingly familiar sound.
He remembered hearing that sound before, at the daily public floggings in Altdorf s main Konigplatz Square, a fearful sound that had ricocheted harshly off the stone walls of the imposing public edifices that lined the vast, open space of the square, and flown over the heads of the crowds gathered to witness the bloodthirsty spectacle. It was the sound of a lash cutting into human flesh; a terrible, sharp, wet cracking sound that still made the old thief in Vido wince every time he heard it.
Moving quietly and carefully, he approached the closed door from behind which the sounds were coming. Suddenly he turned quickly, holding up his dagger in wary alert as he sensed something behind him.
Konniger stood at the other end of the passageway. Vido started to open his mouth to speak, but Konniger raised a cautionary finger to his lips, signalling for silence. The sage- detective then silently turned and moved off towards a side-passage, beckoning for his servant to follow him. Vido hesitated a moment, pausing to look nervously towards the source of the whipping and sobbing sounds, and then hurried off in nimble-footed pursuit of his master.
They found themselves in a side-chapel, one of several contained within the vast building. Their journey there had been short but unnerving at least from Vido's point of view. The monastery was large and rambling, and every passage and stairwell they passed in their journey seemed to echo with more faint but disturbing sounds of human pain.
Standing there in the chapel, Vido watched as Konniger used the flame from the small candle he had been holding to light the room's brazier lamps. The chapel sprang alive as each lamp flared into life, their flickering light revealing the surprisingly splendid details of the room's religiously- inspired decor.
'Look, and tell me what you see,' said Konniger, pointing towards the large, stained-glass window arch behind the chapel's familiar looking hammer sigil-marked altar.
Vido looked, and was even further surprised by what he saw.
The Church of Sigmar was not his chosen faith - he was fairly lax in matters of religious devotion but paid at least nominal lip service to both Esmeralda and Ranald, the patron deities of halflings and thieves, respectively - but he knew well enough what the inside of a normal temple or chapel dedicated to the Empire's fierce patron warrior god looked like.
LIsually, there would be devotional portrayals of the mighty deeds the god had performed while still a mortal man. Images of Sigmar Heldenhammer defeating armies of greenskins or forging alliances with the dwarf lords in the halls of their buried mountain city-fortresses were particular favourites, as was the legendary battle between the man-god and the foul liche-lord Nagash. This last was the centre-piece of many Sigmarite shrines, since this was the fateful moment when the chieftain of the Unberogens smote down the near godlike Great Necromancer. Many Church theologians argued this was the point when the Lord Sigmar transcended his mortal birth and began his path to true divinity.
But Vido saw none of these typical, familiar images. Instead, he saw a stained-glass tableau showing a twin-tailed comet blazing across the heavens, falling to earth and destroying a city in a single, terrible conflagration. Looking closely at the tableau, Vido marvelled at the exquisitely- detailed yet grotesque rendering of the scene. He was impressed by the flames and dark, spewing cloud of daemon things that rose up from the burning crater to fall upon and consume the licentious and impious inhabitants of the doomed city. Vido's grasp of Empire history was perhaps not all it might have been, but the scenes on the tableau stirred
some dim recollection in him of tales of some long-ago historical disaster.
'Yes, this must be the so-called "Hammer of Sigmar" which fell from the heavens to destroy the wicked city of Mordheim, just over five hundred years ago at the end of the Second Millennium, during the terrible time of the Wars of the Many Emperors,' said Konniger, almost as if he could read his manservant's mind.
There are many who still believe the disaster to have been the Lord Sigmar's judgement upon the people of his Empire,' the sage-detective added, staring intently at the images before him, almost as if he were able to see the actual events they portrayed rather than these mere colour-faded representations. 'They say that the children of Sigmar had fallen into wicked and sinful ways, and when the Lord Sigmar looked down upon the Empire he had created and saw it riven by disorder and civil war, that the cataclysm was his wrathful punishment upon his sinful children. I have my own theories about the nature of the stellar body which destroyed the City of the Damned, although some would call such theories no less far-fetched than the most baseless and foolish of peasant superstitions. At the time it was widely thought that the event heralded the end of the world, a proposition I would not necessarily disagree with, since the Hammer's fall set loose many great evils, some of which still fester away and haunt us to this very day.'
'And what about these three lunatics? Where do they fit in?' asked Vido, pointing at the human figures dominating the central window of the stained-glass montage.
Despite the blatant and disrespectful impiety of his manservant's remark, Konniger almost smiled as he studied the group of figures indicated by Vido. There were indeed three of them, each dressed in humble friars' robes, each wearing a pious and saintly expression on their face as they stood against the backdrop of the burning city of Mordheim.
Tears of blood wept from the empty eye sockets of the first holy man; blood ran down the neck of the second from the wounds on the sides of his head where his ears had been; the third had his mouth open wide, showing the bloody mess inside where his missing tongue had been. Each friar held his hands before him, palms outwards. Each pair of hands held
something, almost as if they were making an offering to Lord Sigmar. Blood sacrifice and offerings were an anathema to the followers of Sigmar, but there was no mistaking the nature of the grisly objects being offered up by the three figures.
The first held his own gouged-out eyes; the second the seared remains of his own ears; the third, the vile, pink obscenity of his own tongue.
'Werner, Dieter and Gunther,' said Konniger solemnly. 'Also known variously as the Three Who Are One, or as the Brothers See-No-Sin, Hear-No-Sin and Speak-No-Sin. Holy brethren who had so mortified the flesh of their own bodies, so that they would remain untouched by the great wickedness that saturated the Empire at that time.'
It was with a sudden flash of understanding that Vido grasped what Konniger was driving at.
'The monks here, they're flagellants, aren't they? Just like that poor bugger back at the cathedral in Altdorf. That's the sound we heard tonight, isn't it? They're doing Sigmar knows what to themselves in their rooms, and that's where the screams and moans are coming from.'
Konniger nodded in approval, always pleased when his servant was able to piece together deductions for himself. 'The Order of the Holy Three at Alt Krantzstein is one of the oldest of the flagellant orders. At its height, during the anarchy of the Wars of the Many Emperors, I imagine that it must have held many hundreds of devout brethren. Tell me, Vido,' he asked, looking sharply at his manservant, 'how many monks would you say you have seen here?'
Vido shrugged. 'Difficult to say. A dozen or so, maybe. We've only been here a few hours, but the place seems about as popular as a cemetery on Morrsliebnacht. There's whole areas of the place that don't seem to have been used in a dwarfs lifetime.'
'Agreed,' nodded Konniger. 'The flagellant orders have been in decline for centuries, since Magnus the Pious's rebuilding of the Empire some two hundred years ago. Theirs is a curiously apocalyptic creed, and finds less favour
with the faithful in safer and more prosperous times. Still, I would expect there to be still at least a hundred or so brethren of the order remaining, when, as best as I can estimate, there are probably no more than two score of them.'
He broke off, pausing in thought, before glancing again at his manservant. "We must take great care, Vido. There are secrets and terrible falsehoods abroad in this place. Not everything or everyone here may be as they seem, and we must choose our allies carefully. Tell me, who here do you think we can trust?'
'Captain Gustav, surely?' suggested Vido.
'Yes, the Templar commander and his men. They know our true purpose here, and we have seen evidence of their bravery and loyalty on the journey here. But who else, I wonder? What of Abbot Himerius?'
'I didn't think much of him straight off,' judged Vido, falling back on his reliable instinct that the first, bad impression of someone was probably the truest one, 'and he certainly didn't take to us too much.'
'Indeed,' adjured Konniger. 'He doesn't welcome our presence, that much is already clear. He fears that we may uncover something hidden here, but what? Does he fear we will learn what he already knows, or that we will reveal that which he wishes to remain ignorant of?'
At that moment, there was a furtive shuffling sound from the passageway beyond the entrance to the chapel. Konniger and Vido spun round, just in time to witness a dark shape swiftly step back into the deeper shadows of the dimly-lit passageway. 'A spy!' exclaimed Konniger, as he rushed off in pursuit of the phantom shape, Vido quickly following behind him. When they reached the passageway, they could hear swift, soft footsteps nearby, but retreating urgently away.
Which direction?' asked Vido, his sharp hearing confused by the echoing footsteps coming either from the two branches in the passageway before them or from the darkness of the downward spiralling stairwell to their right. Even as he listened, the sound of the footsteps swiftly and eerily faded away, and then was gone.
What did you see?' asked Konniger.
'I'm not sure. A figure in monk's robes, I think...' came the answer.
'Anything else? Think, Vido. Was there anything else you discerned about our elusive observer?'
Vido paused to think, concentrating as he used some of the simple but effective memory recall tricks which Konniger
had taught him. Now that he put his mind to it, there was something else unusual about the phantom figure, but what was it?
'The footsteps,' decided Vido. They didn't sound right. There was a strange, irregular pattern to them, almost as if the person making them had a body that couldn't move or run in any normal way...'
His voice tailed away for a moment, as he realized the import of what he had just said. He looked fearfully up at Konniger. 'Master, I don't think whatever made those footsteps was entirely human.'
They returned to their rooms, agreeing that further investigations must now wait until morning. Vido lay in his pallet bed, doing his best to get to sleep. He had done what he could to secure the door to the room using various old thieves' tricks that would alert him if anyone tried to enter while he was asleep, but it did little to make him feel any safer in this miserable and wretched hell-hole of a place. Try as he could, he could not blot out the faint sounds of the mumbling, sobbing prayer voices and moans of pain that drifted through the echoing stone halls of the monastery. After a while, he convinced himself that the sounds must have ceased hours ago and that it was only his overworked imagination which kept them alive in his head. How long could the flagellant madmen that inhabited this holy insane asylum spend punishing and chastising themselves every night?
So he lay there, eventually dozing off into a fitful sleep in which the sounds coming from all around him gradually faded away into one low, droning background constant, like the buzzing of insects. As he drifted asleep, he thought for a moment that he heard another, even fainter sound beneath all the moans and cries. His last conscious thought was that he must now be dreaming and remembering the attacks of those terrible beastman creatures on the way here, for this new sound was that of a bestial, hungry roaring.
And it was coming from somewhere deep within the confines of the monastery itself.
* * *
"Who is it? Who's there?'
Again, the Templar heard the noise. Again, he moved in pursuit of it, arriving at the end of the passageway just in time to see a flickering, human-shaped shadow disappear down the steps of the narrow, stone stairwell ahead of him. He drew his sword, at the threshold of the darkness, pausing for a moment and looking back along the passageway towards the more well-lit and properly-inhabited parts of this tumbled-down old heap of a place. He knew that Heitz and Kirchner were somewhere nearby, patrolling this level or the one above, and that one good, loud shout would bring them running.
Still, he held off raising the alarm just yet. There was an eerie air to this Sigmar-forsaken place, a sense perhaps that there was something unclean and unnatural lurking here, something just waiting to be disturbed from its uneasy quietude.
Or perhaps he was just on edge, the Templar thought. They all were. It had been a long and hard-fought journey to this miserable pile of stones, and they had lost too many comrades along the way. And it would have been more, but for the efforts tonight of that bookworm scholar they had been sent here to guard. Every man of them had thought Haider a goner. The filth from the beast-thing's spear had spread with a terrifying speed to infect the wound, but the bookworm had worked some tricks with a few herbs and apothecary remedies, and now it looked like their comrade would live to fight another day in Sigmar's service. There were one or two others who owed their lives to the scholar's medicine skills, and the Templar and his brethren were now in the man's debt.
The Templars' swords were sworn to the service of the Church of Sigmar, and the orders to accompany the scholar to this place had come from the office of the Grand Theogonist himself, or so Captain Gustav had told them. The scholar was here on vital and potentially dangerous Church matters, they had also been told, and it was their duty to protect him, but now his efforts in tending to their wounded brethren lent an extra determination to their task.
The thought relaxed him. He suspected he was over reacting to the atmosphere inside this dark and gloomy place,
and to the strange, discomfiting sounds that echoed round the empty stone halls. We all serve the Lord Sigmar in our own way, thought the Templar, and yet he couldn't help feeling that he and the blade in his hand were of more worth to Sigmar and the defence of his Holy Church than these mad monks and their crazed devotion to self-inflicted agonies.
He was in one of the lower halls now, still chasing the sound of footsteps from the gloom ahead of him. It was even darker and more eerie down here than in the upper levels, and he stopped to lift a guttering firebrand from a nearby wall sconce. Hurrying on, he caught another glimpse of the figure ahead of him as it slipped along the shadows. A few moments ago, he had convinced himself that he was pursuing some errant monk who was surreptitiously abroad at this late hour on some non-sinister if doubtlessly vow-forbidden task. Now, catching a glimpse of the strangely malformed- looking, shuffle-gaited figure, he wasn't so sure. He thought of his two brethren above, but rejected the idea of turning back to summon their aid. If he did, his quarry would be long gone by the time he returned down here.
'Stop! In Sigmar's name, I command you to halt!'
The only response to his bold shout was a quickening in the pace of his quarry's footsteps. The Templar took off after him, running now, determined to bring this whole, mysterious business to an abrupt and decisive end. From ahead, he heard the rattling of metal on metal, like the sound of keys being turned and clanking bolts being drawn. Then there came the protesting scream of rusty hinges as some heavy and long-immobile door or barrier was hauled open.
The Templar slowed the pace of his advance, nervously testing the familiar weight of his blade as he sensed danger close by. 'Stand to,' he called. 'Step out where I ca
n see you, or, Sigmar help me, I'll run you through where you stand!'
The only response from the darkness ahead was silence.
Cautiously, the Templar man-at-arms continued advancing, all too aware of the sudden, dry, bitter taste of apprehension in his mouth. There was a subtle, hot draught of air blowing along the passage towards him now, a shocking contrast to the normal cold chill of the place, carrying with it the faint but discernable reek of something foul and
rotting.
He saw stairs directly ahead of him: worn, stone steps leading down into blackness. At their top, a thick, metal- bound wooden door had been drawn open. The scattering of dust from the corroded bolts and locks painting the surface of the flagstones at the top of the stairs suggested that it had been many years since the door had last been opened.
The smell was stronger here, a hot, feral stink wafting up from out of the darkness below. The Templar stood at the top of the stairs, fearful to descend into this new and unknown place. Surely his quarry could not have gone down into those unlit depths? Surely he would have heard the phantom's strange shuffling footsteps if he had descended down into-
The movement came suddenly from behind him. The Templar felt a strong pair of hands thrust themselves against his back and push hard, propelling him with sickening surprise off the top of the stairs down into the darkness below.
The man tumbled headlong downwards into the blackness, stupidly wondering in what hidden alcove or recess his assailant had been hiding as he felt the bones of his body smash and break against the edges of the stone steps. He landed at the bottom, fracturing his skull in one final, cruel impact on the rough, unworked surface of the stone floor. Fighting off the pain and the sweet, deadly promise of pain- free unconsciousness, he looked up, his vision swimming as he saw the blurred figure at the top of the stairs above - shockingly closer than he thought, even if it seemed that his fall had taken an eternity - start to haul shut the loudly- protesting door.
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