Hours passed. Oblivious to time, Helmut slaked his thirst for forbidden knowledge at a well polluted by a subtle foulness. The power grew in him until he felt that his head would burst if he committed to memory another incantation. It was a monstrous feeling. Presently he shut the cover of the book this time with delicacy and an almost lascivious feel for the well-tooled human leather of the covers. He looked about, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. Yes, it was time.
There was another exit from the hidden suite of the nameless master, and Helmut found it without difficulty. He himself had entered by the back door, so to speak; since when had a necromancer not desired easy access to the nearest graveyard? Deep within the forest he found himself climbing a short flight of steps to a trapdoor. It had been buried beneath soil for years, but the bearings were so well-balanced that, despite a small flurry of dirt, it opened effortlessly in the darkness.
Finding himself in darkness, Helmut clapped his hands softly, and muttered a cantrip he had known even before his accession to power. A soft, lambent light began to glow from an amulet that he swung on a chain before him. Let there be light, he thought. Enough to see by, at any rate. Tangled roots wove like ghastly tentacles across the ground, and the trees rose into the gloom of the forest like the legs of giants waiting to step on and crush mortals.
Helmut instinctively made his way towards the graveyard path that led to the village beyond. He never questioned how he knew where the path was—nor even why it had remained in the same place from century to century, down through the ages—but he found it all the same. He made his way towards the settlement quietly, pausing to sniff the air from time to time. The scent of woodsmoke and charred meat told its own story to his sensitive nostrils, a story of despair and suffering and pointless cruelty. The raiders didn’t know—could not have known—that their target was not at large in the village when they struck. That their target had nothing to do with the village. That their ashes would be dust on the wind before the night was out. A cold anger grew in Helmut’s breast as he drew near to the scene of the massacre. And a ghastly anticipation.
The first victim he saw was a child. Julia Schmidt, the baker’s daughter. Blood on her dress, dark in the moonlight. Her mother lay nearby. He walked on. There were more corpses now; the reavers had fallen upon a fleeing band of women and children, slaughtering them like sheep. In the gloom they might have been sleeping, in cruel, uncomfortable postures forced upon them by the positioning of strange breaks in their limbs.
Helmut kept a rein on his anger. These were his people: firstly the people he had lived among—and latterly the people destined to be his subjects. Then he came to the village.
It was a scene of utter carnage. There were bodies everywhere; twisted and hunched peasants with their weapons still in their hands, oddly pathetic heaps of cloth containing mortal remnants. The wreckage of the houses still smouldered under the moonlight, ashes glowing red around paper-grey cores of charred wood. There was blood in the street.
He slowly turned around, until his eyes had taken in the entirety of the ghastly scene. No one was left alive; any survivors had fled. He felt no guilt, though. Guilt towards such as these was beneath him. But it wasn’t always so, something nagged deep inside. He stilled the dissenting inner voice, and steeled himself for the final art.
No good. Tension and anger curled into knots around his spine. Straightening, he surveyed the corpses. Not one of the reavers had died here! The sight stiffened his resolve. Slowly he stretched out an arm, heavy beneath the sleeve of his black robe, and began to chant a soulless, evil rhyme.
Among the trees a strange rustling could be heard. A shuffling of ragged clothing, a sound like the sighing of the breeze that swung the felon on the gallows. Stick-figures were beginning to twitch and stir. Helmut continued remorselessly. Perhaps a minute passed, and then one of the bodies which was stretched lengthwise along the ground sat up. Moving slowly and arthritically, Hans-Martin Schmidt—the baker—crawled to his feet. He stared vacantly about with a face out of nightmare: mashed-in nose, a jaw that hung below his face by a tatter of drying meat. Seeing a scythe at his feet he bent and laboriously picked it up.
Helmut continued his spiritless, mournful chant. Julius Fleischer rolled over twice in the dust before he too sat up, clutching at the stump of a leg. The leg twitched towards him slowly, forced towards unnatural reunification with its master. The energy pouring into Helmut from the will of the dead Nameless One engorged him with a dark sense of evil; he was one with the night and the magic, as his servants crawled to their feet and, vacant-eyed, shambled towards him.
Finally the incantation was complete; the spell of summoning in place. Zombies were still staggering in, but already a hard core surrounded him. He looked about. The eyes that met his gaze were lifeless: some were merely gouged sockets, while others were hazed and dulled by the flies’ feeding. For the most part these were the menfolk of the village, armed in death as in life. His eyes continued their search, until he saw his father. It might have been his father; its neck and head were too badly damaged for him to be sure in the darkness.
“Follow me,” he commanded in an ancient tongue, the learning of which was not possible in a night—not without enchantment. “The enemy lies sleeping. In death ye shall reap your revenge for the afflictions of life; whereafter ye shall seek peace through my ministrations. Forward!”
He pointed down the path towards the beach and, slowly at first but gradually gathering speed, the horde of zombies plodded towards the reavers.
Ragnar One-Eye and his men were no amateurs. They had not forgotten to place a watch, nor to light fires on the beach. But a single guard was no match for the horror that swarmed out of the darkness in total silence save for the slithering of rank, battle-scarred flesh and the clanking of metallic death.
The guard stood transfixed for two fatal seconds, mouth agape, then he screamed, “Attackers!” He was too late. The horde of death was already scrabbling and clawing its way over the sleepers, knives flickering in deadly arcs.
Helmut stood watching, controlling the attack by force of will alone. Something within him was crying out: if you hadn’t dabbled, hadn’t experimented with corruption, hadn’t wakened the thing under the graveyard… No matter. He pushed the thought aside. Some of the reavers retreated to the boats, making to cast off and push them into the sea and escape.
A couple of his zombies followed, but he recalled them with a peremptory tug of willpower. Let the survivors bear warning to whoever had sent them! A cold smile that was most certainly not Helmut’s own played about his lips as the last of the sleepers died beneath a struggling mound of noisome flesh. The first light of dawn was already beginning to show along the horizon: he turned and, ignoring the destruction around him, walked back towards the crypt.
It was as he had left it. The fighting hadn’t reached the graveyard; a few poppies bobbed fitfully in the morning breeze as he pushed aside the altar stone and again descended into the musty darkness. But this time when he reached the inner chamber he paused before the throne and genuflected. “Thank you, father. I am most grateful for your assistance,” he murmured as he contemplated the heap of bones piled there. The skull grinned at him.
It might almost have been his imagination that as he reentered the apartment a bone-dry wisp of a voice behind him said: Think nothing of it, my son.
But then again, it might not.
THE PHANTOM OF
YREMY
by Brian Craig
Now, said the story-teller, I will tell you a tale of Bretonnia, the country of the marvellous King Charles, who set himself further above his people than any other lord in all the Old World, and who had so many governors under him that he did not know their number, let alone their names.
This story tells of a town named Yremy, which was not so very far from the damned city of Moussillon—not far enough, in the opinion of its citizens. The great earthquake which had destroyed the heart of Moussillon had barely stirred the
foundations of Yremy, and none of the houses of its gentle folk had fallen. Nevertheless, the tremors had left their mark upon the town, for once the rich and the mighty have felt turbulence in the ground on which they tread, they always walk in fear of losing their position.
This anxiety led the noblemen of Yremy to be especially stern and severe in their administration of the law. Whenever the governor had cause to speak to the good and honest men who had put him in his office he was proud to tell them that there was no other town in Bretonnia whose thieves were so fearful of the rewards of judgment, or where the scaffolds were so frequently hung with the broken bodies of those who dared offend the law and its upholders.
With such an advantage as this, Yremy might have been a happy city, but the people of Bretonnia were always a discontented folk. There were among the ungrateful poor a more than tiny number who were embittered by the firmness of their masters, and resentful of the way in which its force inhibited their spirit of adventure.
“How should we live if we cannot steal?” they said to one another when they met in their secret dens and dirty inns. “Must we go back to the land, to spoil our hands and break our backs planting and reaping? And for what? The best grain goes to the rich, who neither dig nor pick, and we are left with the turnips and the beets. We cannot seek honest work as watchmen, for we are the ones for whom watchmen must watch, and our masters would soon perceive that we had nothing to do. We must do what we can to reclaim the night for those who have stealthy business to conduct. We must discover among our ranks a robber of great daring, who can thumb his nose at the governor and his magistrates, and defy every effort of the guardsmen and the secret police to bring him to his reckoning.”
Alas, there was a long hard time when they looked among themselves for this paragon of cleverness, and could not find him. Yremy’s thieves grew lean in the winter, and less capable in their trade as each of them in turn was caught about his business and returned to his family lightened by a hand.
There came a day, however, when there began a series of robberies which restored hope to the poorest homes in Yremy—not petty thefts of food and trinkets from the marketplace, nor even a skilful cutting of purses, but burglaries of the boldest kind.
These crimes were the work of a daring housebreaker who could climb high walls and break strong locks. Again and again he carried away fine jewels, virtuous amulets and gold coins, and sometimes weapons.
Only a handful of the people who were robbed in the early days of his career caught glimpses of this robber, and they could say little about him save that he went about his business clad all in black leather, wearing a mask to hide his face.
Only one man came near to laying hands upon him in those early days, but that was a fat merchant, who was at the time clad only in a linen nightshirt, and he lost all enthusiasm for a tussle when he saw that the thief was armed with a stabbing sword of the kind which is called an epee a l’estoc.
“He stole the bag of coins which was my worldly wealth,” wailed this unlucky man, when he told his anxious friends of his terrible ordeal, “and did not hesitate to add insult to injury, for he took my powdered wig as well when I cursed him as a truffle-digging pig, and impaled it on a spike upon my gate.”
In another realm, his hearers might have laughed about the wig, but in Bretonnia a merchant who apes the gentry by playing the fop is not reckoned a figure of fun, at least by his own kind. The fact that the robber carried a sword was taken more seriously still, for it was held to be proof of murderous intent, and rich men began to quiver in their beds for fear that when their turn came to attract the attention of the thief, he might puncture their bellies as well as their wigs.
Within a matter of weeks every man of quality in the town was howling for protection or revenge.
“We would expert such things to happen in Brionne,” they cried, “but this is Yremy where the law is firm and the peace is sternly kept. Is this a phantom which robs us, that he cannot be captured and held? Is it some black magician who evades our every precaution with his spells? Then let us call upon our wizards and our priests to use their powers of divination! Let us call upon the gods to reveal this miscreant and deliver him to punishment!”
These anguished cries were heard even in the houses of the poor, where they caused a certain merriment, and the name of the Phantom was thenceforth on everyone’s lips, whether they hailed him as a hero or damned him as a villain.
The only comfort that the wealthy could find in the midst of their distress was to say to one another: “In the end he will surely be caught, and then let us see what Jean Malchance and Monsieur Voltigeur will make of him!”
Jean Malchance and Monsieur Voltigeur are two of the central characters of our story, and the only two who can be properly introduced—for the identity of the Phantom must remain a mystery until its climax.
Malchance and Voltigeur were names invariably coupled, for they had been friends since boyhood, schooling together, courting the same woman (and when Voltigeur married her Malchance swore to remain a bachelor for life!), and in the fullness of time performing their public functions in harness, as senior clerk and senior magistrate of the high court of Yremy Voltigeur, who was ever the more glorious of the two, if only by a fraction, was the magistrate, while Malchance was the clerk.
Yremy was a large enough town to boast four magistrates in all, and an equal number of clerks, but whenever a man had cause to think of the high court of Yremy it was Malchance and Voltigeur who sprang first and foremost to mind. They were different from their fellows, because they had a lightness of touch in conducting their affairs which was born of long friendship. They were witty and clever, and their exchanges frequently evoked wild laughter in the public gallery of the court, even when the said gallery was packed with the friends of the accused.
To say that there was a lightness about their manner is not at all to say that there was any lightness about M. Voltigeur’s sentencing. Even in that matter, though, the cleverness and wit of the great man shone through. Aided by Malchance, M. Voltigeur was most inventive in his choice of punishments, sometimes devising penalties which were previously unheard of in the whole of Bretonnia. Some said that he followed the spirit of the law more closely than the ordinary scheme of punishment, but it must be admitted that others assessed him differently. M. Voltigeur himself said only that he tried to make a punishment fit the crime by which it was earned.
It is of course true that many people believe the customary scheme of punishment to be already well-designed to serve the end of suiting the penalty to the crime. They hold that there is an abundance of natural justice in the common decree that a murderer should be hanged, a thief deprived of his offensive hand, and a petty traitor—which is to say, a woman who murders the man to whom she has been given in marriage—burned alive. But M. Voltigeur was not entirely satisfied with the beautiful simplicity of this ordinary scheme, and it was his invariable habit to attend to matters of finer detail, which led him to treat different thieves quite differently.
For example, a man who stole an amulet or a gold coin might be allowed by M. Voltigeur to keep his hand, but instead be branded upon the forehead with the imprint of that same amulet or gold coin, heated near to melting-point, so that he must ever bear upon his brow the image of that which he had unlawfully coveted. A man who stole a bolt of fine velvet cloth (an item of much value in civilized Bretonnia) might likewise be allowed to keep his hand—but only on condition that he went about thereafter clad in a shirt of prickly hair which tickled his skin most horribly.
By the same token, a poisoner would not usually be condemned by M. Voltigeur to be hanged upon the scaffold or (if of gentle birth) beheaded by the axe. Instead, he would be placed in the public pillory, and given a series of very noxious brews to drink, until his guts felt as though they were on fire, and the flesh upon his bones turned black and green as it rotted expeditiously away.
Even the poorer people of Yremy perceived a clever wit at work in these un
usual punishments, and the loyal public which loved to see the executioner at work thought him a fine fellow for saving them from the ennui which might otherwise claim them when the common business of hanging became overfamiliar. M. Voltigeur was therefore an extremely popular man, frequently called “the great judge.”
The so-called Phantom had not been long at his work when it became apparent that there was something most peculiar in the pattern of his crimes. For one thing, members of the family of M. Voltigeur appeared more often in the list of his targets than seemed likely. These burglaries stood out for a second reason too: instead of wholesale plunder of the accessible assets, the Phantom removed only a single item from each household, often leaving behind jewels and coin of considerable value. In every case involving a relative of the magistrate, the object removed was something the owner considered very precious, but each victim asserted that the value was chiefly sentimental.
The close relatives of M. Voltigeur at this time numbered five. He was a widower, but had three surviving sons and two daughters. When the houses of all five had been invaded it became abundantly clear that some special of malice was at work.
The fifth incident, involving the younger daughter, left no other interpretation possible, for this daughter had been unwise enough to marry for love, and she possessed nothing that was authentically valuable. She did, however, have a carved wooden heart which was marked by a patch of red dye in the shape of a teardrop, which she treasured greatly, not so much because of its significance as an emblem of the goddess Shallya, but because it had been given to her by the mother she had lost in infancy. This object was of no worth to any other, yet the clever robber went to some pains to remove it from her.
When the news of this particular crime spread through the town the possibility was widely discussed that the Phantom was engaged in exacting some perverse revenge upon those near and dear to the city’s favourite judge. All Yremy waited to see how M. Voltigeur would respond.
The Laughter of Dark Gods Page 5