Dead Winter

by C. L. Werner

  It was a bitter kind of loyalty Boris would gain, but it was the only sort he would trust – a loyalty built upon need and dependence rather than respect and admiration.

  The Bread Marchers. Von Schomberg could understand what the Emperor wanted with them now. Each Bread Marcher was a displaced soldier, one less sword in the arsenals of the other provinces. But his scheming went still deeper. Drawing the desperate men to Altdorf, to the Imperial capital, Boris intended to exploit them still further. He was deliberately allowing the shantytowns to grow. He was encouraging the despair and lawlessness taking hold of the city.

  When the time came, when Boris was certain the size and scope of the thing would be unmistakable, then he would act. He would send out his soldiers to put down the rioters. The streets of Altdorf would run red with blood, the blood of valiant men who only months before had fought for the same Empire which would cause their doom. Afterwards, the bloodshed would be enough to silence the Emperor’s critics. He would have all the justification he needed to exempt the Imperial Army, Altdorf and perhaps even the Reikland itself from the head tax on their Dientsleute.

  Von Schomberg turned away from the parapet. ‘The Emperor will act,’ he assured Erich. ‘He will act when there is no other choice but violence so that none can gainsay him. He will call out his Kaiserjaeger and his Reiksknecht and send them out to ride down starving men.’

  Erich’s expression sickened at the image the Grand Master conjured. ‘Surely it won’t come to that! Knights don’t ride down defenceless men!’

  Von Schomberg locked the young captain’s eyes in a cold stare. ‘We have guaranteed our honour through service to the emperor. Every knight of the Reiksknecht is sworn to obey the emperor without question and Boris is our Emperor. If he calls upon us to ride down the Bread Marchers, then that is what we will do!’

  ‘It will mean a massacre,’ Erich stated, shaking his head in disgust.

  ‘Yes,’ von Schomberg said, turning away to resume his walk along the battlements.

  ‘It will mean a massacre.’

  Bylorhof

  Kaldezeit, 1111

  Shouts and howls resounded through the town. Peasants thronged the streets, gathered together to watch the macabre procession creeping through Bylorhof. Twenty men, their naked bodies glistening with sweat and blood, struggled through the muddy lanes. Before them they pushed a hideous altar mounted upon the bed of a wagon. It was a ghastly, semi-human effigy, the eidolon of Bylorak. The marsh god’s statue was a monstrous thing carved from green stone, a squat, broad-shouldered man-like thing with a gaping, toadlike mouth and a single hideous eye set into its forehead. Marsh reeds formed the eidolon’s hair and swamp moss served it for a beard. In its left hand it held a fish. In its right, a human skull.

  The men pushing the idol through the streets weren’t part of Bylorak’s priesthood. Most of the under-priests were dead and the chief priest had fled to a hermitage somewhere in the marsh, abandoning his temple. In his absence, fanatics of the ancient religion had taken it upon themselves to act. They had broken down the doors of the temple and stolen the image of their god, that Bylorak might witness the devotion and faith of his disciples.

  Through the streets the procession crept. At every sixth step, the men pushing the idol would stop. Crying the name of their god to the heavens, they would lash themselves viciously with scourges. The whips ripped at their flesh, spattering the street with blood. After some minutes, the flagellants would stop and resume their march through the town.

  Frederick van Hal watched the procession with a feeling of horror. Some of the flagellants were men he knew, pillars of the community. Terror of the plague had driven them into the madness of fanaticism. Viewing the gods of the Empire as weak and impotent, they had turned back to the old gods of the Fennones. The Black Plague had brought a second disease to Sylvania. A plague of unbelief.

  The priest of Morr could almost sympathise with the desperation of the peasants. They had watched their priests and priestesses die all around them, unable to stop the plague, unable to bring the beneficence of the gods to the stricken community. If Shallya and Morr would not protect their own servants, then what hope was there for a simple commoner?

  Such was the attitude of the laity, but to a clergyman, things were not so simple. Frederick understood that the gods worked through faith, that at those times when all hope was lost was when it was most important to cling to faith. The gods tested men, tested the strength of their will and determination, for only through ordeal could the true quality of man be revealed.

  The priest pulled his robe tighter about his chest as a chill swept through his body. Such were the ways of benevolent gods, but there were other gods as well, gods of such malevolence as to make the cyclopean Bylorak seem beneficent and kindly. These gods were ancient and utterly malignant, daemonic things lurking just beyond the light, forever straining to cast down the world of men. Frederick had learned much of such gods when he had studied in the great librarium of the temple in Luccini, eldest of Morr’s temples in the Old World.

  He had learned more when he assumed the duties of high priest at the Bylorhof temple. There was a reason he had been chosen for that duty, why the lectors decided to install an outsider to this temple. The old priest, a Sylvanian, had been removed for practising the most obscene heresies. He and all his possessions had been consigned to flame, his very name purged from the temple records. The selection of a Westerlander to replace the apostate was to be a declaration that the previous infamy had been scoured from the temple.

  It hadn’t, of course. The peasants still looked upon the temple of Morr with horror and made the signs of other gods when they passed Frederick in the street. The temple of Bylorak had revived the old rites, disposing of the dead in the mire of the marsh so that none need pass beneath the gateway of Morr’s garden. Baron von Rittendahl’s wife, upon her passing, had been interred within the castle crypt without ceremony, the infamy of Frederick’s predecessor making it impossible for von Rittendahl to have a Morrite ritual – if he even wanted one.

  Father Arisztid Olt had left an indelible legacy behind him… and more. When the Black Guard had come for the apostate and consigned him to the pyre, they had missed the most prized of the heretic’s possessions. Beneath the temple, in the oldest crypts, Olt had maintained a secret library – a collection of forbidden tomes and occult grimoires that eclipsed even the Luccini temple’s collection of arcane lore.

  A dream had led Frederick to the hidden library. Morr was god of sleep as well as death and employed dreams to guide his servants. It was a sacrilege for a priest of Morr to ignore any dream. When Frederick’s dream showed him the old crypt and the secret door, he had taken it as a sign from his god. When he descended into the crypt, he found everything as it had been in his dream. When he followed the winding marble corridors, he followed in the steps of his dream-self. When he reached up to brush the beak of the obsidian raven carved into the face of a pillar, he could see the spectral hand of his dream-self. When the entire pillar sank into the floor, exposing a hidden doorway, Frederick knew what he would find.

  It had been ten years since that discovery. It was the reason Frederick appreciated the spiritual doubts and fears of the peasants, but it also gave him an understanding of the folly to which such doubt and fear could lead. The gods could fail men, but men could also fail their gods. Evil times need not be a token of good gods, but a sending of evil ones to tempt men into the clutches of Old Night.

  Frederick stirred from his recollections, staring with rising anger as he watched the flagellants lash themselves, as he noted the rapt fascination, the hopeful desperation of the spectators. Bylorak was an abomination, a relic of days when men crawled before inhuman masters. There was no salvation to be found by grovelling before the marsh god, only a path to depravity and destruction. Better to perish of the plague than live in such obscenity!

  ‘Stop this!’ Frederick cried out, stepping into the street. He brandished his staff,
holding it before him, blocking the way. The wagon shuddered to a stop, the cyclopean visage of Bylorak glaring down at him. The flagellants came out from behind the wagon, their scourges slashing into their own backs, their voices raised in moans of outrage.

  ‘Defiler!’ one of the fanatics wailed, his lips flecked with foam. ‘You dare stand before his sight!’

  ‘Bylorak watches us all!’ shrieked another flagellant. ‘He sees us, for we are his children! He hears us, for we are his children! He helps us, for we are…’

  Frederick advanced upon the shouting flagellant. ‘You are fools, bowing to a stone effigy and worshipping a monster! All men die, but while they live they must do so with decency, with honour.’

  The flagellant twisted away, prostrating himself before the eidolon. ‘He helps us, for we are his children!’ Tears rolled down the fanatic’s face as he pressed his lips to the webbed feet of his god. Frederick moved to pull the man away, to restore some dignity to the naked wretch. But as soon as he reached out, his body recoiled in pain. A stone struck him in the cheek, slashing his pale skin. A second stone crashed into his side. The priest retreated as more stones came flying at him.

  The barrage came not from the flagellants but from the peasants lining the street. The procession had stirred their hopes as nothing had in the past weeks and now they were aroused to violence by Frederick’s effort to save them from themselves.

  ‘Go back to your carrion, jackal!’ one woman cried. ‘Are you so eager to fill your garden? Is Olt’s pup trying to outdo his master?’

  The jeers and the barrage of stones increased, driving Frederick into flight. Rocks pelted his body at every step, dung and offal from the gutter plastered his robes. By the time he reached the safety of a covered pigsty, the priest’s body felt like one big bruise. It took him a moment to appreciate that he owed his respite not to the security of his refuge, but to the shifting attention of the mob.

  Distracted to violence against the priest, the peasants of Bylorhof were once again under the spell of the flagellants. The fanatic who had kissed the idol’s webbed foot was still crouched before the wagon, but now his naked body had turned black. From head to foot, the flagellant was covered in pitch. The priest’s eyes widened in horror as the kneeling man began to cry out to Bylorak, begging the marsh god to forgive the desecration caused by Frederick. A second flagellant approached the praying man, a flickering rushlight clenched in his fist.

  The pitch-coated flagellant ignited like a torch, his prayer rising in a single scream. The stunned spectators maintained an awed silence as the surviving flagellants circled behind the wagon and pushed the grinning idol over the blazing husk of their late comrade. Even from his vantage point, Frederick could hear the crack of the man’s bones beneath the wheels.

  The priest hobbled away from his ignominious refuge while the crowd was still fixated upon the macabre procession. He shook his head sadly. There was one thing the gods could not save man from. That was man’s own folly.

  It was something Frederick van Hal knew only too well.

  Chapter IV

  Nuln

  Kaldezeit, 1111

  Despite the thick wool coat he wore, Walther Schill found himself shivering as he walked along Fox Street on his way to the Black Rose. He’d be thankful for a good warm fire and a nice pot of ale, anything to drive the cold from his bones.

  Winter had descended upon Nuln with the fury of an invading army. Wissenland was infamous throughout the Empire for its unforgiving winters, but this one was announcing itself with all the savagery of the White Wolf. Frost coated every brick and stone, the streets were a slush of snow and ice, dagger-like icicles dangled from every eave and cornice. The wind swirled between the buildings like a slinking predator, withering the faces of the unprotected with blasts of frozen malignance.

  How different from the sewers, Walther thought. It was easy to forget it was winter down there in the hot, humid dark. Perhaps it was that very fact which had caused the numbers of rats to swell. Perhaps it was the cold that had forced the vermin below, seeking shelter in the damp warmth of the dwarf-built tunnels. Whatever the cause, their numbers had increased to such a state that Walther had purchased three ratters and been compelled to take on an apprentice. Hugo Brecht wasn’t the most likely lad, but there was a natural boldness to him that made up for his lack of experience.

  Walther stifled a sniffle as he strode past a chandler’s shop and passed a huddle of ragged beggars. He closed his ears to their piteous pleas for alms. It was something that was becoming easier to do with each passing day.

  Nuln was almost like a city besieged. Rumours of plague in Stirland had proven out and all commerce with the province had been suspended. Count Artur had tried to make up the loss in trade by making new compacts with noblemen in Reikland and Talabecland, but these overtures had yet to bring food into the city. Wissenland and Solland, provinces given primarily to producing wine and wool, could offer little in the way of supplies no matter the price. It was joked grimly that when the burghers agreed to pay a lamb’s weight in gold, the Wissenlanders might agree to send mutton instead of wool.

  The threat of famine was becoming real enough that the Assembly had increased the bounty on rats, offering three pennies a tail. The storehouses and granaries were too important to suffer the menace of vermin burrowing their way inside and despoiling the stores. For a population faced with the possibility of rampant sickness, starvation was a complication it could not afford to entertain.

  The plague. Walther shuddered at the very thought. He’d been in the Black Rose one night when a sailor had described its effects. His ship had been docked in Mordheim when a Sylvanian merchant had been discovered with the disease. The man had looked scarcely human, his body blotched with ugly black sores that dripped filth with every breath he took. The city watch had quarantined the merchant’s house and the entire block around it. The sailor had been lucky to slip away before the cordon was closed.

  The Black Plague they were calling it. Spread by evil vapours, some said, while others claimed the hex-magic of witches was responsible. Whatever the cause, one thing could be agreed upon. Wherever the disease established itself people died. Not one or two, but by the bushel. The pyres outside the walls of Wurtbad, it was said, could be seen days before a ship came within the harbour.

  The first incidences of disease had appeared in Nuln over the last few weeks despite the embargo against Stirland. Entire households in Freiberg and Handelbezirk had been placed under quarantine and the priests of Morr had been commanded to report any plague deaths to the Assembly. Mobs of militiamen, often without official sanction, prowled the streets looking for anyone who might be hiding symptoms of the disease.

  Commotion in the neighbouring street drew Walther’s attention away from his fears about the future. Peering down an alleyway into Tanner’s Lane, he could see many people running along the street, their passing marked by the glow of rushlights and oil lamps.

  ‘Something’s going on over there,’ Hugo remarked, a factual if not particularly insightful observation. He shifted the bag of dead rats slung over his shoulder and stared his mentor in the eye. ‘Should we go see what that’s about?’

  Walther deliberated for a moment. Rumours and stories were easy enough to come by, but this was a chance to see for himself what was happening. A sensible man could only trust half of what he heard, and less than that if his source was a sailor. But what he saw with his own eyes – that was different. That he could trust.

  ‘Let’s go,’ the rat-catcher decided, checking to see that the cowhide pouch where he put the tails of his quarry was secure. People were becoming desperate enough to steal just about anything, and from just about anyone.

  The two men hurried down the alley, the terriers trotting along beside them. Once they were in Tanner’s Lane, Walther could see that a large crowd had gathered about one of the street’s many tanneries. Even from a distance, the angry murmur of the crowd had an ugly and murderous quality a
bout it.

  ‘Quick,’ Walther hissed under his breath, breaking into a run. The crowd was showing every sign of degenerating into a mob. Before that happened, he wanted to find out why. Racing ahead of Hugo, who had managed to trip over one of the terriers, Walther was in time to see a body being carried from the tannery by several men in the leather aprons of tanners. Like the pallbearers, the body lying upon an improvised litter of uncured horsehide was garbed in a long leather apron and carried the pungent stink of a tanner. The neck of the corpse was twisted and savaged, a great mess of torn skin and bloodied flesh.

  ‘It was them that did it,’ a voice from the mob snarled.

  ‘They cut old Erwin’s throat,’ growled another.

  Other angry shouts rose from the mob. Some of the men attacked the little fence outside the tannery, pulling out wooden stakes to employ as makeshift cudgels. Others pried stones from the street, brandishing them in their fists as though wielding Count Artur’s Runefang.

  ‘They did it!’ a nameless voice cried out. ‘They murdered Erwin because he was well and they weren’t!’

  ‘Sick in flesh, sick in soul!’ cried out another, and the shout was taken up by others in the mob. Yelling and screaming, the crowd drifted away from the tannery, marching down the lane towards a little stone house with a red cross marked upon the door.

  Walther knelt beside the now forgotten corpse, the dead man in whose name the mob had abandoned itself to violence. He folded the cold hands across the body’s breast, then leaned forwards and examined the neck.

  ‘They’re crazy!’ Hugo exclaimed, joining Walther by the body. ‘They’ll kill somebody!’ he added, gesturing with his pole at the amok mob.

  ‘Right as usual,’ Walther said, peering intently at the gashes in the tanner’s throat.

  ‘Aren’t we going to try to stop them?’ Hugo asked.

  Walther gave his apprentice a piercing stare. ‘They won’t listen to reason. Not now. When faced by a mob like that, you have three choices. Become part of it, be a victim of it, or stay the hell out of the way.’