“It looks like we’ve found your prey, Obermarshall,” snapped Wolff, kicking one of the corpses.
They rushed to his side and saw a large, smouldering body lying at his feet. It was as scorched and broken as everything else, but even the ravages of the fire couldn’t hide the thing’s monstrous shape. Ratboy grimaced at the stink emanating from it, but stepped closer nonetheless, curious to study the monster. It was vaguely man-shaped, but its shoulders and limbs were grotesquely swollen and muscled, and covered with a thick, greasy hide. Wolff used his iron-clad boot to roll the thing over onto its back, revealing a head that was bloated and distorted into a roughly bovine shape, with great gnarled horns sprouting from its face.
“What is it?” whispered von Gryphius, his eyes wide with shock.
Wolff looked up at him in surprise. “This is the evil that plagues us, Obermarshall; this is the great prize you’ve been seeking.” He ground his boot into the thing’s hide and grimaced. “This is the embodiment of corruption. ‘By the simple undividedness of Sigmar’s being, the faithful will find truth; as surely as the deceiver’s form will reveal that which his words would hide.’”
He shrugged and led the way towards the chapterhouse, which was the only building not to have been completely destroyed by the flames. As they approached it, the number of bodies increased, as did the awful stench that came from the fallen beastmen.
“The fighting seems to have been fiercest here,” commented Wolff as he stepped up to the shattered door that led into the building. As the others gathered behind him, weapons at the ready, Wolff used his warhammer to shove the door open. The splinted wood screeched noisily as it swung inwards, but the darkness inside was complete. The pale grey sun seemed afraid to cross the threshold and illuminate the bloodshed within.
Wolff gripped his hammer tightly in both hands, and then disappeared into the blackness.
After a second’s hesitation, Ratboy followed.
At first the gloom seemed impenetrable, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, vague shapes began to emerge and he saw that the floor was littered with overturned tables and chairs. It looked like the scene of some final defence, with the priestesses and soldiers barricaded inside the chapterhouse. From the shattered state of the door and the broken furniture, Ratboy guessed that some kind of battering ram must have been used to smash the barricades aside. He looked around but could find no sign of such a weapon.
Movement caught his eye, and he saw a towering shape rush towards him out of the darkness. He lifted his knife, and then lowered it again as he recognised Wolff’s chiselled features glowering down at him.
“They’re all dead,” muttered the priest, shaking his head and gesturing to the white shapes slumped on the floor around them. “I believe I just found the Abbess.” He held up a ring. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but as the metal rolled between the priest’s fingers, Ratboy realised it was decorated with a white dove carrying a golden key. There was an unusual note of emotion in Wolff’s voice as he continued. “These women desired only to help. They bore no allegiance to any army or lord. They didn’t deserve to meet their end in this way.” He closed his fist around the ring and secreted it within his robes. “Come,” he said, stepping back towards the door.
The light vanished before either of them could reach the doorway, plunging them into a darkness even more profound than before. A colossal shape had blocked their way, towering over even Wolff. Ratboy heard the deep, rattling breath of a large animal.
Wolff shoved the acolyte violently across the room and as he tumbled over the broken furniture, Ratboy heard a great weapon slam into the ground where he had just been standing. He gasped in pain, winded by a chair leg that jabbed him in the stomach as he landed. As he rolled onto his back, groaning, shapes whirled around him in the darkness, crashing into walls and tables and grunting with exertion.
Sparks flew as weapons collided and in the brief flashes of light, Ratboy saw Wolff fighting desperately against a creature so big it had to stoop beneath the chapterhouse’s vaulted ceiling. The light was gone too fast for him to be sure of the monster’s shape, but he was left with a vague impression of massive, coiled muscle and long, curved horns.
Ratboy tried to draw breath, but retched instead, powerless to call for help. As he felt around in the dark for his knife, he heard Wolff muttering something nearby. Then, as the priest uttered a final, fierce syllable, glittering light flooded the chamber and the creature looming over them was revealed in all its monstrous glory. It was obviously the same species as the bodies outside, but even more grotesquely oversized. As holy light poured from Wolff’s hammer, shimmering and flashing off the whitewashed walls, the creature bellowed and swung an axe at the priest’s head. The weapon was almost as big as the priest himself, and as he leapt out of the way it smashed into the wall, cutting into the stone with such force that the whole building shook, sending masonry tumbling from the ceiling. The priest’s warhammer slipped from his grip as he landed, clattering across the flagstones and disappearing from view.
The room plunged into darkness once more.
The grunting and smashing sounds continued until Ratboy heard Wolff cry out with pain. As the monster moved back and forth, brief bursts of light crept in from the outside, and in one such flash he suddenly saw the beast lifting Wolff from the ground, about to smash him against the wall, swinging him as easily as a straw doll.
Ratboy tried desperately to rise, but he was still unable to breathe and fell to his knees again, whimpering pathetically as he crawled towards the two combatants.
There was a final, deafening bang and then silence filled the chapterhouse.
As Ratboy crawled painfully towards the doorway, the acrid stink of saltpetre filled his nose and he saw another figure stood just inside the doorway, with a thin trail of smoke drifting from its raised hand.
“I told you we didn’t need more men,” said von Gryphius, lowering his flintlock pistol with a high-pitched laugh. The colour had drained from his face and his eyes were rolling with fear. As he helped Ratboy to his feet his thin voice sounded slightly hysterical. “What exactly was that?” he asked, gesturing to the huge mound that lay at his feet.
“Good work, Obermarshall,” came Wolff’s voice from the darkness. He stepped into the shaft of light coming through the doorway and looked down at the monster’s body in confusion. “I’m amazed your shot could pierce such a thick skull.”
Von Gryphius nodded slowly, still staring at the huge corpse in amazement. “I’m a regular at the Giselbrecht hunt,” he muttered. “And that fellow’s left eye was conveniently large.”
The ghost of a smile played around Wolff’s lips as he studied the general, then he took Ratboy’s arm. Once outside, they both fell to the ground, exhausted. When he had caught his breath, Wolff took the ring from his robes and looked at it thoughtfully as it glittered in the sunlight. The dove was stained with the blood of its previous owner. “I must talk with Anna,” he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE RESTLESS DEAD
Recently, Erasmus had begun to speak to the bodies as he worked. He knew it was a little odd, but with each passing day, he found the mortal world harder to understand and had come to think of these waxy, shrouded shapes as his friends. Their stillness comforted him and sometimes he would give them voices; replying to himself as though the dead were answering. His talk was endless and anodyne: the changing of the seasons and the consistency of his porridge were the most regular topics. He doubted the corpses minded though. After all, his were the last mortal thoughts that would ever be directed at these poor, lost souls.
The garden of Morr at Elghast was a humble temple, but its crypt was a bewildering maze of tunnels and chambers. The priest’s flickering lamps had only ever illuminated a small fraction of it. Four generations of his family had tended the dead in this place, but as far as he knew, no one had ever attempted to map out the full extent of the catacombs. The limestone arches had once been ornately carved in the lik
eness of skulls and black rose petals, but over the centuries the pillars and cornices had shrugged off their sculpted edges, reasserting their natural, ragged shapes.
A more inquisitive mind might have wished to explore the distant, ancient chambers, but not Erasmus. As he performed the funerary rites, he sometimes heard movements from deeper inside the network of tunnels, and felt obliged to investigate, but it usually turned out to be nothing more than rats, feasting on the dead. The rest of the time, he left the rows of crumbling mausoleums alone.
The clapping of large wings announced the arrival of Udo, fluttering in through the half open door that led back up to the temple. As the raven settled on her perch, she cawed repeatedly at the black-robed priest, tilting her head to watch him as he shuffled from corpse to corpse.
“Really?” replied Erasmus, pausing in the act of cleaning a knife to look up at the bird. “That’s most unfortunate, old girl, but owls have as much right to eat mice as you do. All creatures have a right to live.” He carefully lifted a shroud and plunged the knife into something soft and yielding, causing a thin arc of fluid to patter gently across the stone floor. “At least, for a while they do.”
He chopped and sliced in silence for a few minutes, frowning in concentration. Then he paused. “Now then friend, what’s this?” he muttered, tugging an arrowhead from his subject’s chest with a moist popping sound. He held the bent piece of metal closer to his lamp and peered at it. “I don’t think you’ll need this in the afterlife.” He dabbed at the wound with a cloth and muttered a quick, sonorous prayer, before dropping the arrowhead in a little copper bowl with a clang. “Was it really worth it, I wonder,” he said, taking a jug of oil from a nearby table and tipping a little onto the corpse’s chest. As the chamber filled with the scent of rosewater, he shook his head. “What cause was worth losing everything for, at your age? How old were you exactly?”
“Early thirties,” he replied to himself in a deep voice. “Thirty-five at most.”
“I see. Old enough to have a family then, maybe, and people who loved you, but that wasn’t enough—you had to look for something more. Something exciting.”
“There’s no love out there anymore, father: covetousness, maybe; the desire for other men’s land; bloodlust perhaps, but no love.”
Erasmus sighed as he continued to anoint the body. “Yes, I suppose you might be right.” He paused, frowning at something. Then, with another wet pop, he removed a second arrowhead. “There certainly doesn’t seem to have been much love for you.”
He wiped down the second wound and finished applying the scented oil. Then, placing the knife back in a leather roll, he shuffled across the chamber to a small recess in the damp rock, filled with a collection of bottles, jugs and mildewed books. He selected one of the texts and returned to the body, where he began to pray. He wished the deceased a quick journey to the afterlife and begged Morr to grant him safe passage.
Natural light hardly reached down into the crypt, but after a few more hours’ work, Erasmus’ stomach announced quite clearly that it was midday. He stroked his tonsured head and gave a little yawn. “Oh, Udo, I think it might be time for some lunch.”
The raven gave no reply.
He extinguished all the lamps apart from the one in his hand and fully opened the door that led back up to the temple, allowing a little more distant, grey sunlight to penetrate the immemorial gloom. He extinguished his final lamp and began to climb the rounded steps, holding out his arm for Udo to perch on. “Bless me!” he exclaimed, slapping his head with his hand and turning around. “I’m such a doddering old fool. I forgot all about our new guest.” He climbed back down, relit his small, iron lantern and closed the door again, shuffling back towards the furthest recesses of the chamber. The single flickering light picked out a corpse that was such a recent arrival the priest had yet to find a shroud for it. “I can’t leave you like this all afternoon, now can I?”
“No,” he replied to himself. “You should at least show a little respect for a fellow priest.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry, brother,” he muttered, lifting some muslin from a shelf as he approached the body. “Are you actually a priest though?” he wondered aloud, holding the lantern over the remains. The body was that of a wiry old man, with thin, greasy hair and puckered, weather-beaten skin. “This certainly seems to suggest you were a man of faith,” he said, holding the light over a symbol on the old man’s stomach. The sagging folds of skin below his ribs were branded with the shape of a flaming hammer. “But there’s something about your expression that makes me wonder.” He stooped until his clouded, myopic eyes were just an inch or two from the corpse’s face. “There’s something a little wild about you.”
“I’m a mendicant,” Erasmus said to himself in the same sonorous voice he gave all the dead. “That’s why I look so emaciated.”
“Well, yes, that would explain the sunburned skin too, I suppose, but what about this injury? It looks to me more like the wound of a soldier, or a fanatic even. You certainly didn’t get this in a temple.” He moved the lantern across the body, illuminating a large, ragged hole, just beneath the man’s left shoulder. “And I suppose this must have been the work of your servant,” he said, fingering the crude attempts at bandaging.
“You’re a naive old fool,” Erasmus replied to himself in a deep voice. “Hiding away in the dark for all these years, as the world turns on its head. You think that priests don’t get murdered? No one’s safe anymore. Violence is the only currency people understand in these dark times. You remember what Ernko said, when he delivered his brother’s remains. The whole of Gumprecht is consumed with madness—they’ve turned on each other, hunting down their own families like dogs. They’ve burned their own houses to the ground. All because they think there’s a heretic somewhere in their midst—someone who might draw the gaze of the Ruinous Powers in their direction. And remember that ferryman from Hurdell? He said the people from his village had begun dressing as goats and eating grass, in the hope it would appease the creatures of the forest and spare them from attacks. And if that merchant from Ferlangen was correct, half the cities in the province have fallen to the enemy.”
Erasmus shook his head in surprise as he peeled back the dark, damp rags that covered the wound. “What kind of weapon did this to you?” he muttered. In truth though, after the horrors of the last few years, there was little that could shock the priest anymore, and he began to hum a little ditty to himself as he worked. He reopened his roll of tools and fetched another bottle of ointment. Then, he paused. “Looks like you’ve still got something in there, friend,” he said, peering into the bloody hole. “Is that a splinter of wood?” He took a small scythe-shaped tool from his roll and slid it into the wound.
The corpse gave out a deafening, tremulous scream.
Its eyes opened wide in terror and one of its sinewy hands shot up, grabbing Erasmus’ shoulder in a tight grip.
Erasmus dropped the knife to the floor with a clatter and stared back at the animated corpse in confusion; then he began to scream too. He tried to pull back from its grasp, but the corpse’s second hand shot up, grabbing him firmly by the other shoulder.
The corpse’s face was twisted in horror and confusion as it looked from Erasmus to the surrounding darkness. The vague shapes of the other bodies were just visible, and the corpse shook its head wildly, before turning back to the priest. “I’m not dead,” it breathed in a croaky whisper. “For Sigmar’s sake, I’m alive!”
“I work here mostly on my own,” said Erasmus, shuffling cheerfully in and out of his bedchamber. “My brother, Bertram, visits occasionally.” His lips twisted into a grimace. “He only comes to help when he has to, thankfully—only when there’s too much embalming for me to handle alone. Mind you, that seems to be more often than not lately.” He lifted Surman up into a sitting position and handed him a cup of water. “Lately it seems like the dead outnumber the living.” He chuckled as he pulled open the shutters, filling the small room
with flat grey light. “Another cheerful Ostland day,” he said, watching the autumn rain slanting across the forest below.
Surman watched him carefully over the top of the cup as he took a gulp of the water. He immediately spat the liquid out and burst into a series of hacking coughs, spraying flecks of blood all over the bed’s woollen sheets.
“Be careful,” said Erasmus, dashing to his side and snatching the cup from him. “You need to drink it slowly.” He shook his head and gently patted Surman’s bony, hunched back. “It’s a miracle you’re alive. That wound must have missed your heart by an inch.” Once the coughing fit had passed, he handed the cup back and sat on a stool next to the window. “Your man brought you to me certain that you were dead.” Erasmus looked at the floor to hide his embarrassment. “There are various tests I would have performed before beginning the embalming, of course. I was just going to remove a couple of the splinters.”
Surman sipped the water again, carefully this time, and he managed to hold it down. His hollow, stubbly cheeks were still as grey as the rain clouds rushing past the window, but his breath was coming a little easier now, and he was beginning to think he might even survive. “Who brought me here?” he asked in a strained whisper.
Erasmus’ long, pale face lit up with a smile. “You sound so much better!” He clasped his tapered fingers together and muttered a prayer. “My skills as a healer are rarely called upon. It’s been a long time since I practiced herb lore. I wasn’t sure if that poultice would be powerful enough to draw out the illness.” He shook his head in amazement. “You’re made of sterner stuff than you look, old man.”
No hint of emotion crossed Surman’s face. He took a slow breath and then repeated his words a little louder. “Who brought me here?”
The eager smile remained on Erasmus’ face as he replied. “As I said, it was your man.” He looked up at the ceiling and drummed his fingers on his knees. “I think he said his name was Albrecht or Adolphus, or—”
[Empire Army 05] - Warrior Priest Page 6