Skellan gave up trying to sleep after an hour, and instead concentrated on listening to the sounds of nocturnal life stirring in the forest. He could hear the wolves, padding back and forth just beyond the tree line. He thought again of the old woman’s warning to stay on the path. He had no intention of moving away from the dubious safety the path offered. It seemed, at least, that the trees acted as some kind of natural barrier that the wolves dared not cross.
It hadn’t been his imagination. Sickly yellow eyes really were watching them from the forest. A wolf, a giant of a wolf, came close enough to be seen through the silver moonlight. The creature was easily twice the size of a big dog with a long snout and jowls that Skellan imagined curled back in a snarl, saliva flecking the animal’s yellowed teeth. The wolf remained there, stock still and staring back directly at him, long enough for Skellan to feel his heartbeat triple as it thudded against his chest and his breathing become shallow with the onset of fear, but it didn’t leave the shelter of the trees. Skellan didn’t move. He didn’t dare to. A single sudden movement could cause the animal to launch an attack and he was in no doubt as to who would come out on top in a fight between man and this particular beast. Beside him Fischer slept like a babe, oblivious to the wolf.
As quickly as it came, the wolf was gone. It ghosted away silently into the darkness. Skellan let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding. The tension drained from his body with surprising speed.
He heard more wolf howls as the night wore into morning but they were always distant and getting further away each time. He ached. His back ached, the base of his spine the focal point for the irregular jabs of pain that helped keep him awake all night. The inside of his arms burned from being always ready to reach quickly for his knife. The bones in his legs transmogrified to lead and weighed down through the tired muscle encasing them. With exhausted sleep there for the taking the sun rose redly on the horizon.
Daybreak.
Fischer stirred.
Skellan kicked him with the flat of his foot. “Sleep well?”
The older man sat up. He knuckled the sleep from his eyes. Then, remembering, shuddered. He exhaled, hard. The breath sounded like a hiss of steam. “No. No not at all.”
“Looked like you did all right to me,” Skellan said, unable to keep the bitterness of exhaustion out of his words.
“I dreamed… I dreamed that I was one of them, one of the wolves prowling the forest. I dreamed that I found you in the darkness, that all I wanted to do was feed on your flesh… I had to fight every instinct in my body just to stay still, to wait back behind the line of the trees because some part of me, the human part of the wolf, remembered you were my friend. I swear it felt like I stared at you for hours.” He stretched and cracked the joints in his shoulders, first the right shoulder, then the left. “Morr’s teeth, it was so real. I swear I could taste your fear on the air with my tongue… and part of me thought it was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. I was inside the head of the thing but it was inside me too.”
“If it makes you feel any better you didn’t move so much as a muscle all night, and yes, I was awake all night.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll be happy when we are away from here.” Fischer said with absolute conviction.
“I won’t argue with you there.” Skellan rose stiffly. He hunched over, stretching out the muscles in his back. He grunted. He moved through a series of stretches, using the exercise to focus his mind. Fischer’s dream disturbed him, not because he thought his friend had some latent psychic talent that stirred conveniently for him to enter the beast’s mind, but because, perhaps the wolf, or whatever it really was, had found a way into his friend while he slept. That possibility made putting as much distance between themselves and Verhungern Wood their main priority.
They walked for the best part of the day, the wolves’ howls receding into the distance, before exhaustion overcame them, forcing them to bed down beside a brackish river. Signs of life returned to the countryside. It was a gradual thing, a blackbird watching with beady eyes from a roadside hedge, a squirrel spiralling up a withered tree trunk, black-bodied eels in the river, but mile by mile and creature by creature the world around them was reborn, making the earlier absence of wildlife all the more disturbing.
The following evening the bony hand of Reuth Losa’s infamous tower poked above the horizon. Even from a distance the tower was impressive in its nightmarish construction. Five bone-white fingers accusing the sky, their moonlit shadow reaching far out across the swampland beneath the imposing tower. Skellan hadn’t seen anything like it before and he considered himself a man of the world. It was unique. It could have been a dead man’s hand reaching through the mountainside.
A rancid stench emanated from the swampland. Marsh gas. The land itself bubbled and popped with the earth’s gases. For all that, they ate well that night, in the shadow of Reuth Losa. Fischer trapped a brace of marsh hares, which he expertly skinned and filleted and boiled up in a tasty stew with thick roots and vegetables, and for the first time in two nights Skellan slept dreamlessly.
The market town itself, swallowed in the shadow of the great tower, was not what Skellan had been expecting. When the pair finally arrived at dusk on the fourth day, the streets were deserted. With grim resolve the two men walked down the empty streets. Skellan’s fist clenched and unclenched unconsciously as he moved deeper into the eerie quiet. The houses were single storey wooden dwellings, simple in their construction but sturdy enough to withstand a battering from the elements. Windows were shuttered or boarded up.
“I don’t like this place one little bit, my friend,” Fischer said, pulling at one of the nailed-down boards barring a ground floor window. “It’s not natural. I mean, where is everyone? What could have happened to them?”
“Plague,” Skellan said, looking at the sign painted over one of the doorways across the street. “My guess is they ran to the next town, taking the sickness with them. Still, he’s been here,” Skellan said. “We’re getting closer. I can feel it in my gut. We’re close enough to spit on him.” He walked across the street and pushed open the first door he came to. The mouldering stench of rotten food met him on the threshold. He poked his head inside the small house. Light spilled through cracks in the shutters. The table was still set with an untouched meal of sour pork. Flies crawled across the rotten meat. Piles of white maggots writhed with a sick pulsing life where there should have been potatoes. The place had been abandoned in a hurry, that much was obvious. He backed out of the room.
Fischer faced him from an open doorway across the street.
“Ghost house!” he called over. “It’s as though they disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“Same here!” Skellan called back.
It was the same story in every house they explored.
On the street corner they heard the distant strains of melancholy music: the sound of a violinist’s lament. They followed the elegiac melody, faint though it was, through the winding ribbon of streets and boarded up houses, tracing it to its source, the old Sigmarite temple on the corner of Hoffenstrasse. The facade was charred black from fire and stripped of its finery but it was still an imposing place, even if it was only a shell. The wooden steps groaned under their weight. The door had been broken back on its hinges where it had been battered down.
“Something happened here,” Fischer said, giving voice to the obvious truth. Temples didn’t burn down of their own accord, and streets didn’t lie deserted by chance. The Sylvanian motto might well be to leave the questions to the dead but Skellan wasn’t some superstitious bumpkin afraid of the dark and forever jumping at his own shadow. Strange things were afoot and their very peculiarity only served to pique his curiosity. Inevitably the riddles would play out one way or another when they confronted the musician, and in doing so, no doubt, would lead back somehow to Sebastian Aigner.
They moved slowly, carefully, aware that they were walking into the heart of the unknown.
The damage to the outside of the temple was nothing compared to the systematic destruction of the inside. All signs of the religion had been scoured from the building. It had been gutted, pews stripped and broken up for firewood, in turn used to purge the life from the place. The stained glass windows were ruined, shattered into countless shards of coloured glass that lay melted and fused into ingots across the dirt floor. The lead had been stripped from the roof and sunlight dappled through like a scattering of gold coins. The altar had been cracked in two and the life-size statue of Sigmar lay on its side where the Man-God’s legs had been shattered. The effigy’s right hand had been broken off. Gahlmaraz, the Skull Splitter, Sigmar’s great warhammer, lay in the dirt, the Man-God’s cold stone fingers still curled around its shaft.
Sitting at the feet of the fallen idol an old man in a simple muslin robe played the violin. He hadn’t heard them approach, so lost was he in the sadness of his own music.
Skellan’s feet crunched on debris as he picked his way forward to the musician. The music spiralled in intensity then tailed away in a simple farewell. The old man laid the instrument on his lap and closed his eyes. Skellan coughed and the old man nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked terrified by the sudden intrusion into the solitude of his world.
“Sorry,” Skellan said. “We didn’t mean to startle you. We just arrived in town… we were expecting more… people.”
“Dead or gone,” the old man said. His voice was brittle with disuse, his accent thick and difficult to understand. Pure Reikspiel, it seemed, did not survive this far from the capital. The thick dialect would take some getting used to. “Those that didn’t succumb to the sickness fled to Leicheberg in hopes of outrunning it.”
Fischer picked up a piece of the fallen statue. “What happened here?”
They blamed Sigmar for not protecting their daughters from the wasting sickness. At first they came and prayed, but when their children continued to sicken and die, they turned on us. They were out of control. They came in the night with torches and firebrands and battered down the doors. They were chanting “Wiederauferstanden” over and over as they set fire to the temple.”
“The risen dead…” Skellan muttered, recognising the word and its cult connotations. “Strange things are afoot, my friend. Strange things indeed.”
“Describe the symptoms of this sickness, brother,” Fischer prompted, sitting himself beside the old man. He had his suspicions already but he wanted them confirmed.
The old priest sniffed and wiped at his face. He was crying, Fischer realised. It must have been hard for the old man to force himself to remember. He was their shepherd after all, and his flock had scattered because he couldn’t protect them.
“The Klein girl was the first to fall, a pretty little thing she was. Her father came to the temple to beg us for help because she was getting weaker and weaker, just wasting away. There was nothing we could do. We tried everything but she just continued to sicken. It all happened so shockingly fast. It was all over in a matter of a few nights. And then there was Herr Medick’s eldest daughter, Helga. It was the same, no matter what we tried, night by night she literally faded away before our eyes.”
Fischer thought of the girl whose funeral they had stumbled across. A wasting sickness, the old woman had said. He didn’t believe in coincidences.
“I’m sorry,” Skellan said. “It must have been difficult. Nothing you did helped?”
“Nothing,” the old priest said. The girls died. There was nothing I could do. I prayed to benevolent Sigmar for guidance but at the last he turned his back on me and my children withered away and died.” There was an understandable bitterness in the old man’s voice. He had given his life to helping others, and when they needed him the most he had proved helpless.
“How many?” Fischer asked, knowing that two or three deaths could still fall into the realm of chance.
The old man looked at him, eyes brimming over with guilt and tears. “Sixteen,” he said. “Sixteen before they finally fled from the wasting sickness. They were all girls. No more than children. I let them down. Sigmar let them down. The children of Reuth Losa are gone now; there is no hope for my town. I failed it.”
Fischer looked at Skellan.
Sixteen was well outside the realm of chance.
“You did all you could, there was nothing else you could do, you said so yourself.”
“It wasn’t enough!” the old man lamented. He hurled the violin away from him. It hit the head of the Man-God and snapped its neck. Sobbing, the priest crawled across the debris to the ruined instrument.
“Come on,” Skellan said.
“Where are we going?”
“You heard the man, the survivors fled to Leicheberg. That means the cultists and Aigner. If we find one, no doubt we will find the other.”
They left the old man on his knees, cradling the broken instrument to his chest like a dying child.
CHAPTER TWO
Afraid of Sunlight
LEICHEBERG, SYLVANIA
Early spring, 2009
The old lady had been right: Leicheberg was to all intents and purposes a city, even by Empire standards, though its inhabitants hardly seemed like city-dwellers. Their faces were pinched and weathered by hunger, their eyes sunken with the familiarity of disappointment, their frames bowed with the burden of living from day to day. They lacked that spark, that vital flame that danced mischievously in the eyes of folks back home.
Back home.
They had no home.
They had forfeited it when they began the hunt for their wives’ killers.
There was no beauty in their world now, so perhaps that was the reason the people they encountered looked so listless, so drawn, worn, beaten and broken? Perhaps it was a reflection of their own spirit they saw in these strangers’ eyes?
The two strangers could walk the streets without attracting stares. Food queues lined up at the market stalls, thin-faced shoppers bickering over the last few morsels of not-quite-rotten vegetables. Puddles muddied the streets where the spring rain had nowhere to drain away.
The place smelled of close-packed unwashed bodies, cabbage and urine. No one gave Skellan or Fischer a second glance.
The pair had been in Leicheberg for a week. They had rented a small room in a seedy tavern off the central square called The Traitor’s Head. The name more than suited the establishment. It was a den filled with iniquities galore making it the perfect place to gather rumours. People’s lips loosened when they drank. They talked out of turn. Spilled secrets. Skellan was not above listening to the drunken ramblings of braggarts and the pillow talk of prostitutes.
They had spent the first two days in the city in search of refugees from Reuth Losa, specifically those who had lost daughters to the mysterious wasting sickness that the old priest of Sigmar had described. Those few they found told the same sad story, how the sickness had come from nowhere, their daughters rising in the morning light-headed and woozy after a restless night, only to weaken over successive nights as the sweats and fevers gripped them, until they finally fell into a deep sleep from which they couldn’t be woken. The parents spoke of candlelight vigils, useless prayers, fussing physicians and the same bitter swansong of death. There was precious little to be gleaned from delving into their sorrow. That much was obvious. While no one had anything to say directly about Sebastian Aigner, they had plenty to say about the Wiederauferstanden.
The Risen Dead was indeed a cult. Few would talk about them in any great detail for fear of retribution from unseen hands. It seemed the cult had infiltrated various levels of Sylvanian society, from the beggars and thieves at the bottom to the ranks of the nobility at the top. It was indeed tied to the worship of the undead. From what Skellan and Fischer could glean, the followers worshipped those abominations for being more than human. They aspired to be like these monsters.
The very thought of it left Jon Skella
n cold; how could anyone in their right minds dream of being such an unholy parasite?
“You said it yourself, Jon, it’s a sickness,” Fischer said.
They were walking through the market square looking for a trader the locals called Geisterjager, the Ghost Hunter. His real name was Konstantin Gosta and he specialised in selling locks and chains he made himself from his small stall in the market place. He had a reputation for complicated mechanisms, the kind of thing you would use if you wanted to keep something precious safe from thieving hands. The Ghost Hunter was the best. He could design anything you wanted from tiny mechanisms to massively complicated combination locks that worked on convoluted mechanical techniques of cogs and tumblers having to fall into an exact predefined sequence.
“I just can’t believe that people would willingly do that to themselves,” Skellan said, shaking his head.
“You mean you don’t want to believe. We’ve both seen enough of it to know it’s true.”
“Blood sacrifices to try and raise the dead.” He ran his hand through his hair and looked around the crowded square. The stupidity of it.” He spied the Ghost Hunter deep in conversation with a woman. She left without buying any of his wares. Rather than approach the locksmith immediately they stayed back inside the anonymity of the crowd and watched him. He was polite, said hello to passers by but very few stopped to examine his wares and those that did, didn’t part with any of their hard-earned coins. Judging by the few minutes they saw it was difficult to imagine the locksmith earning enough to make ends meet. The obvious answer of course was that he didn’t, not legitimately. His knowledge of locks could be used not only to manufacture them, but also to open them. By day a locksmith, under cover of darkness the Ghost Hunter was a thief. There were few better in this day and age.
“A word, Gosta?” Skellan said, moving up beside the smaller man.
Without turning to see who was talking to him, the Ghost Hunter muttered, “Take scruples, I’ve got no use for them. Better off getting rid of the word from my vocabulary.” He scratched at the palm of his right hand compulsively. The man was wound tightly, permanently fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot, scratching different parts of his body in a cycle from scalp, to cheek, to scalp and down to the fillets of his left arm, his side, the side of his face, just beneath the left ear, and back to the top of his head.
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