NACHEXEN
The Doktor of Hangenholz

 

 

The first time I saw a corpse I was five years old.

Well, I suppose that is not entirely true. There had been Old Jack, Black Jack, the village’s protector, for a start. But it was the first time I had seen the dead body of someone who had been close to me. It seems strange now to think that I was ever close to anybody, but once, I have to admit, I was. It was my mother. She had died of a fever.

Did her death affect me deeply? Looking back now I believe it must have done, possibly more than even I realised at first.

My sister Katarina was only three at the time and could hardly even remember our mother. Our dear mother. But to me her smiling face is as warm and bright as it ever was when she was alive; even now after so many, many years.

It was she who bore us, who reared us, who cared for us. She was the one who fed us when we were hungry, gave us comfort when we were sick or insecure, cheered us when we were sad. She was the one who loved us.

And she was so much more to us than a mere mother. She was all the things that a mother should be, certainly. Provider, peacemaker, nurturer, carer and source of comfort. But she was also so much more. For she was a balance to our father. She gave us everything our father did not. She loved us.

Still to this day I do not understand why my father ever married, let alone why he had children. My memories of my father from before my mother’s death are of a sinister, distant figure, who might as well have been Morr himself to a terrified child. But my memories of him from the time after her death are darker still.

And besides, that was all so long ago now. So many years have passed.

So why is it that I can remember it as if it were only yesterday?

 

The sun rose wan and watery on the winter-chilled morning of the ninth day of Nachexen. The first lancing spears of burnished sunlight pierced the smeared glass of the carriage window, rousing the hunched young man from a state of disturbed semi-sleep.

Dieter Heydrich blearily opened his eyes and peered myopically out through the mud-spattered pane. Beyond that he didn’t move. The hood of his travelling cloak was bunched behind his head into a makeshift pillow, his thick mane of black hair half-hung over his face. His complexion was as pale as his hair was black. Dark bags of skin had formed under his eyes due to lack of sleep and a disturbed night’s rest.

They had stopped at Vagenholt for the night, at a coaching inn there. But one of the other passengers, a rotund, fat-moustached merchant from Altdorf had urgent business in Bögenhafen—something to do with meeting a barge travelling downstream from Weissbruck—and had provided the coachman with a gilt-edged incentive to get there at the same time as the morning’s river traffic plying its way on the Bögen, heading for the mighty Reik.

Opposite him the merchant who had requested the early start was still snoring into his moustache.

Not that Dieter minded arriving earlier than expected. He had been looking forward to this day for the last thirteen years, he realised now, almost ever since the untimely and unwelcome death of his mother prior to this day. The only sadness he had felt on leaving Hangenholz was the emotional wrench of leaving his beloved sister Katarina behind. He had asked her to come with him, pleaded even, but she had been adamant, her place was with their father. She would remain with the black-hearted old priest and keep house for him, as she had done for all of them from the age of seven. And he would miss her, he knew, almost unbearably so.

Dieter hadn’t spoken to any of his travelling companions; he hadn’t seen the point. He wasn’t going to see any of them again. And besides, he didn’t find it easy to make idle conversation with strangers. As soon as he had boarded the carriage at Karltenschloss, having made himself as comfortable as possible, all things considered, he had directed his gaze out of the carriage window, watching the wilderness of the Empire pass them by.

Not that it had stopped others trying to make conversation with him. A moneyed widow, in particular, all black gown, ridiculous overly ostentatious frills, podgy fingers and more than her fair share of chins. Dieter had given only curt responses to her incessant, probing personal questions and in the end had stooped to feigning sleep to escape the virtual monologue the dowager had sustained since leaving Karltenschloss. She had an opinion on everything, as had her late husband it seemed, from the price of Bretonnian wines—for which she had an obvious liking—to how the Empire should be run.

The red-nosed merchant had made polite conversation with her at first, every once in a while throwing conspiratorial, if not particularly subtle winks and smirks in the direction of his conspicuously disinterested travelling companion. The merchant had taken great pains to introduce the young man to everyone on board—as well as every innkeeper they had done business with on the three-day journey—as his nephew.

Dieter judged the young man to be of a similar age to himself, but that was where their similarity ended. The youth was a fop, dolled up like a mummer, in Dieter’s opinion, in silks and other expensive fripperies. Strategically placed beauty spots might be all the rage amongst the members of the ostentatious Imperial court, but to Dieter’s mind they looked out of place in the outlying market towns and country provinces of the Empire.

His appearance was certainly a stark contrast to Dieter’s plain cloak and well-worn and practical, rather than fashionable, jerkin, breeches and money belt. The merchant’s snooty companion was fair where Dieter was dark, his build cadaverously thin where Dieter, although slight, was toned. Jewellery adorned his fingers, wrists and ears, whilst Dieter wore none. The fop’s gaze was condescending and sarcastic where Dieter’s was brooding, guarded and tight-lipped. And he had nothing in common with the effete merchant or wittering dowager either.

As they had drowsily boarded the carriage again at Vagenholt, as the village bell was ringing four of the clock that morning, none of the four temporary travelling companions had been particularly ebullient, not even the dowager. The fop had picked at his nails in silence whilst the merchant had been the first to doze off to sleep again.

Even though he was excited to finally arrive at the town where he would make his name, on being roused by a grubby-faced urchin—the keeper’s son—Dieter had sleepily struggled into his clothes, musty from days of travel, feeling the first biting chill of morning in the fire-bereft spartan room. He then gathered up his scrip and dragged himself downstairs and onto the coach.

The single trunk that comprised the rest of his luggage was still strapped to the top of the carriage, along with the possessions of his fellow travelling companions. In fact it barely seemed that there was any room for his one piece of luggage when he saw how much the dowager was transporting with her and the skeins of cloth the merchant had insisted on bringing with him, along with the strongbox, replete with three heavy locks that he kept with him, beneath his seat, at all times.

All the luggage certainly didn’t seem to leave much room for the driver, the Four Seasons’ pistolier watchman and the merchant’s personally hired bodyguard—a brawny man with a polished dome of a head, sporting a brutal scar that bisected his right cheek and continued on, down the line of his neck, beneath the collar of his battered hauberk. The strong-arm’s broken-toothed grimace and ugly broken nose was enough to deter most opportunist robbers, Dieter thought, but just in case they didn’t persuade everybody, his brutal-looking battleaxe and shoulder-slung crossbow probably would. If any thieves persisted in the face of all of those warning signs, then they deserved whatever they got for their pains.

Dieter had thought that the two employees of the Four Seasons Company looked by far the worse for wear, but the merchant’s incentive was more than enough to shake their hangovers from them long enough for them to get the coach back on the road.

As the carriage jolted on its way, Dieter’s thoughts were drawn back to the home, the village and the people he had left behind. His sister, his father.

The last thing his father had done for him, before he had left Hangenholz, was to open his personal coffer and give Dieter the money for the coach fare to Bögenhafen.

There had been no words of well-wishing or any suggestion that Dieter might be missed. It was as if he was glad to be rid of his son. Now eighteen, and a man, it was time he made a name for himself in the world beyond Hangenholz, if that was what he was determined to do. It was as if Albrecht Heydrich did not understand what Dieter was trying to do with his life, that he wanted to make a difference.

It was only Katarina who had shown any emotion at her brother’s departure, the tears falling freely from the limpid deep brown pools of her eyes. The memory of the sadness he had seen in those eyes Dieter knew would haunt him for a long time to come, particularly in the dark watches of the night and the lonely times that undoubtedly awaited him in the days, weeks and months of study ahead.

Then she had pulled herself together again and wished him every blessing and told him how proud she was at what he was doing. And then the sadness in her eyes had been tempered by the familial love he felt for her, and from her, and an ember of pride flared into glowing life.

The memory of her warm words expressing pride and love would temper those dark times and bring some warmth into his heart, no matter what the trials and tribulations of the forthcoming years of study would put in his way.

The persistent snores of the merchant, the irritated sighs of his younger travelling companion and the dowager’s heavy breathing whistling through her yellow-stained teeth, Dieter watched the world go by, feeling the anticipation and excitement rising within him with every bump of the carriage, his breathing frosting on the cold glass of the window.

He was almost there, at Bögenhafen, at last. He was on the verge of beginning to fulfil a life-long dream, a desire he had harboured for the last ten years, when, at the age of eight, three years after his mother’s death, he was at last able to express what he had wanted to do since the day he was told that the brain-fever had taken his mother from him, and the life and love he had known, were taken with her.

Within a matter of hours now—if that—Dieter Heydrich would be admitted to the grand guild of physicians of Bögenhafen.

The old year had been and gone and now, with the buoyant new year celebrations of Hexenstag, and the eerie witching night of Hexensnacht eight days past, the first signs that spring was on its way were already upon the land, showing themselves on the trees, in the undergrowth, even in the scent of the air. New life would soon come to the Empire, following the dead months of winter, just as new life had come to the Empire twenty-two years before, when Magnus the Pious and the armies of the Empire had met and defeated the Great Enemy at the gates of Kislev and the Great Incursion by the North had been halted.

A subtle mist was rising from the swathes of meadow beyond the trees lining the road, the warming golden rays of the sun’s first light lifting the night’s dew from the ground. The first fresh green growth of spring almost seemed visible on the elms and alder, the still-lifeless fingers of the trees’ branches clawing at the grey sky and forming a canopy over the road.

In only a matter of days Dieter would begin training that would set him on the path to become one of the greatest healers the Empire had ever known.

And then, there between the trees, on the other side of the mist-shrouded meadows, he saw it, the grandeur that was Bögenhafen.

Dieter gave an audible gasp and felt his scalp tighten, his skin turning to gooseflesh. He had never seen anything like it. Dark stone walls rose up to crenellated battlements thirty feet high, containing the riot of even taller, steeply sloping-roofed town houses, tenements, mysterious towers and temple spires. The town had stood for hundreds of years and from first impressions Dieter thought it looked like it would stand for centuries more.

Port, market town or seat of learning; it was all these things and more to the overwrought Dieter. To him Bögenhafen embodied hope, deliverance from the peculiarities of his childhood, a future. It offered a life away from Hangenholz and the spectre of his father’s disappointment, dispassionate disinterest and deathly influence.

Dieter was fully awake now, exhilarated at the prospect of reaching Bögenhafen and commencing a new, more optimistic, chapter in his life.

It was claimed that town was the third largest in all the Reikland with a huge population at around the five thousand mark, and that did not include the passing travellers, bargemen, merchants, guard contingents, peddlers, pilgrims, livestock farmers and dispossessed, vagabonds, beggars and travelling actors, troubadours and other entertainers.

This wooded stretch of highway ran parallel to the imposing eastern wall of the town that looked like it could hold an army at bay for weeks, if not months. Fortunately for the people of Bögenhafen, during the Great Incursion of the Imperial year 2302, the invading armies of the north failed to reach as far south as the Reikland, although there was a rise in the activities of proscribed cults at the time and herds of beastmen ran amok throughout the forests, terrorizing the roads through for the best part of the year. Roadwarden patrols had been doubled at the time and templar purges of their forest strongholds were increased to deal with the growing menace.

At the north-eastern corner of the towering town wall another, much lower dry-stone wall enclosed the town’s graveyard, covering an area of some two acres, by the looks of it. Dieter could see only one gate leading into Morr’s field and he caught sight of a squat, grey chapel through the pillars and lintel of the lych-gate, hunched between the tumble of ancient gravestones and statues of mourning angels. For a moment, on seeing this, Dieter felt strangely at home. The sight of the cemetery was strangely comforting to him.

Beyond the graveyard a stand of trees ran down to the banks of the River Bögen in the distance.

The carriage continued along the main highway until it reached a broad, churned and rutted crossroads. The winter had made a muddied mess of the road here and work crews had yet to be sent to put it right. The last frost of winter still speckled the muddied channels formed by the passage of cart wheels and the hoof holes of animal traffic, making it look like the ground had been liberally sprinkled with tiny, glittering diamonds.

They turned right, approaching the town’s imposing east gate. It certainly was an impressive edifice, two tall, arrow-slitted towers dominating this view of the town wall, rising as they did on either side of a narrow, unassuming gateway. Lacking a castle, the walls and guard towers of Bögenhafen were impressive fortifications in their own right.

Hearing the strident, croaking caw of a carrion bird, Dieter turned his gaze on the thick oak post he could see firmly hammered into the ground beside the road. Looking up, he saw a cartwheel silhouette starkly dark against the dove grey sky. Hanging from it by the wrists were three naked corpses—those of thieves or murderers no doubt—secured by their ankles to the post itself. The carrion birds were already taking their breakfast from the peck-hole riddled cadavers, the flesh greening, the congealed blood black.

A trundling farmer’s cart laden with bales of straw was on the road ahead of them, being drawn by two lumbering oxen. They passed the cart as it turned off the road and passed between the hazel hurdles demarcating the perimeter of the livestock market. The Schaffenfest, renowned throughout the Reikland as one of the greatest livestock fairs to be held in the Reikland, was still two months away, but there was always a semi-permanent market based here for most of the year, only really closing down for the coldest winter months of Ulriczeit and Vorhexen. With Nachexen already a week old, the market had started up again.

Beyond the hurdle fence Dieter could see that the tents and temporary lean-to structures of the livestock market had already been erected for the new season. In truth, however, many of the barns had become semi-permanent also, possibly only changing location within the market field itself between the monthly gatherings there, but never really being taken down or dismantled entirely.

The gentle lowing of cattle and the pitiful bleating of early lambs, separated from their dams, drifted to Dieter’s ears across the wet meadow, along with the distinctive manure smell of livestock markets everywhere.

A heavy shadow fell across the carriage, a pall that reduced the bright morning light to a dusky twilight, as the imposing town wall rose up to meet them.

Buried at the heart of the massive gatehouse was the east gate itself. The town watch were in the process of changing shifts. A weary-looking older man saluted the two, yawning, unshaven men who had come to replace him before trudging through the gate himself, no doubt heading back to the guard barracks and thence to bed. All of the watchmen wore the yellow tabards over their leather armour displaying the town’s coat-of-arms—a merchant vessel above, the image of a fish below, separated by a bar set with three roundels.

Now that they were actually at the gates, which were already open to the day’s traffic, Dieter could see that they were in fact wide enough to admit two carts together, at a push. This realisation only served to make the towering gatehouse seem even more threatening and impressive. That, combined with the macabre reminder of the town’s justice system he had already seen outside the gates, gave an ominous message indeed to the young, would-be physician: once you are inside these walls you will live by our rules, follow our edicts, or pay the ultimate price.

The driver stopped the carriage at the gate. There was a rustling of papers and a muttered exchange between the driver and the watchmen. One of the two gate guards opened the door to the carriage and stuck a broken-veined, unshaven face inside, much to the chagrin of the dowager and the merchant. Then the carriage was moving again and they were through the gate, and Dieter enjoyed his first proper view of the town that was to be his home for the next two years at least.

Dieter sat in his seat at the window, his jaw agape as he took in the wonders of Bögenhafen. The carriage followed the main road, the Nulner Weg, into the town, rattling over the cobbles of the paved streets.

Dieter had visited towns before in his eighteen years, of course. Once or twice a year he had accompanied his father to the market-hub of Karltenschloss to collect alms from the Church of Morr and obtain supplies for the Chapel in Hangenholz. But Bögenhafen was something else again, three times larger than Karltenschloss, with a population four times the size. It was wondrous for the young scholar to behold.

The houses rose to a height of three, four or even five storeys above the street, with many of the upper floors jutting out further than the walls of the buildings. This meant little on the main thoroughfares through the town, but down the side-streets, the upper storeys jutted out so far that they turned the streets into darkened tunnels, where the sun, if there was any, only penetrated their chill depths for a few minutes during the hour when the sun was at its zenith. In the winter months this could mean that the streets saw no light at all and so only those who did not want their business known, or those who preyed on the business of others used those streets. It was worst in the poorest areas of the town.

The streets of Bögenhafen were still quiet this early in the day. In a few hours’ time they would be thronged with people going about their daily business. For the moment they were still the preserve of watchmen returning to their barracks following the night shift, market traders arriving early to set out their stalls and business-minded clerks ready to make the most of the day, having left late the evening before. A town like Bögenhafen was only as successful and as wealthy as its mercantile classes.

Dieter could see other streets running off to the left of the Nulner Weg, into the well-to-do mercantile district of the town. To the right narrower streets wound more torturously into the artisans’ quarter and the poorer parts of the town to the east.

And then, only two hundred yards along the cobbled street, a sign, creaking from a rusted iron bracket outside a solid stone building. The building was an imposing four-storey edifice with small, lead-paned windows on every floor, rising to a proliferation of turret rooms and slate-tiled pitched roofs.

Dieter glanced at the sign as it creaked in the gentle morning breeze being funnelled along the main street into the town from the river, bringing with it the aroma of stagnant mud and rotten fish. And then he was no longer glancing but staring, his heart racing and an elated smile breaking out on his face. The sign bore an image in peeling paint of a pestle and mortar: the sign of the physicians’ guild.

Dieter wanted to jump up, to cry out that the coach should stop and deposit him here, at his goal, the place that would mark the beginning of a new direction in his life, here in Bögenhafen. But Dieter had never been the most confident of individuals and his inherent shyness got the better of him now. He remained where he was, saying nothing.

And then the carriage had passed the guild house and Dieter saw the street opening out ahead of them, his attention drawn back to Bögenhafen as new wonders of the town were revealed to him. The carriage passed out of the Nulner Weg and into the paved expanse of the Göttenplatz. The wide-open space of the square was in stark contrast to the close-clustered tenements, shops and town house offices of the rest of the town. And a grand sight it was too, for the acre of the Göttenplatz contained the principle temples of the town.

The square was dominated by the grand Temple of Sigmar, a great hall of a building with a towering spire at either end, contained within its own walled grounds. The dowager made the sign of the hammer, while the merchant—also now awake—was busy pointing out the colonnaded hall that looked more like a merchants’ basilica court than a holy place. It was the centre of worship of Bögenhafen’s own patron deity, the merchant-boatman Bögenauer.

The carriage was currently passing a smaller building adorned with carved stone likenesses of wolves, this temple being dedicated to Sigmar’s rival within his own holy Empire, Ulric, god of war and winter. Ulric was more highly favoured in the northern provinces of the Empire, particularly in and around the city of the White Wolf itself, Middenheim. Beyond it, Dieter could see parts of a dome and tower belonging to another, more elaborate structure.

The frost was fading from the cobbles and slabs of the square. Dieter suddenly felt very small and insignificant in the face of such enduring, heavenly majesty.

To the right was the plain, unassuming frontage of a Temple of Shallya, goddess of healing. The temple-infirmary appeared to take the form of two wings surrounding an inner courtyard.

A few of the most dedicated, or desperate, faithful were already making their way to morning prayers at the various temples, most heading for the dominating presence of the Sigmarite temple. The clear tone of a tolling bell could be heard ringing out over the spires of the other temples across the Square of the Gods.

Then the carriage had passed through to the other side of the Göttenplatz and into the town’s administrative hub, the Dreiecke Platz, beyond. It was only a short journey from there, past Bögenhafen’s impressive town hall, with its pillared facade and impressive spires, and past the huge building housing the merchants’ guild, arriving at a two-storey coaching inn going by the name of the Reisehauschen.

Dieter eagerly disembarked from the Four Seasons coach, clutching his scrip, containing his few precious books and what little money he had, tightly to him. But he then had to wait to have his trunk unloaded as the dowager bossily demanded that the coachman help her down from the carriage before doing anything else.

Dieter was tired and sore from the journey but full of excitement and quiet enthusiasm for the adventure that lay ahead, for he was here at last, in Bögenhafen.

The corpulent merchant anxiously oversaw the unloading of his possessions as soon as he could and then disappeared inside the inn, followed by the fop and their bodyguard. The last thing Dieter heard from him, through the open door of the establishment, was the merchant demanding a room for him and the young man, who he was at pains once again to introduce as his nephew on his sister’s side.

Dieter’s trunk was unceremoniously dumped in the street outside the Reisehauschen, almost as an after thought by the grumpy coachman and his assistant. Then they climbed back onboard and guided the two horses, pulling the creaking carriage behind them, around to the back of the inn towards the stabling yard. With his travelling companions ensconced inside the inn, Dieter was left alone in the Bergstrasse. At the far end of the street he could see the fortified structure of the town’s west gate—as impressive and forbidding as that of the gate he had entered the city by, passing beneath portcullis and murder holes set into the mighty fortifications.

Dieter turned away from the west gate. That was not the way he wanted to go. He was here to stay. Taking a firm hold of the leather strap at the end of his trunk and hefting its end up, he began to make slow progress back along the Bergstrasse towards the physicians’ guild.

 

Taking a deep breath, his heart racing in anticipation and his mouth dry with nerves, Dieter knocked on the door at the top of the creaking stairs three times. He had wanted the knocks to sound strong and confident but in reality they sounded weak and pathetic.

Dieter felt tired, what with the re-commencement of his journey from Vagenholt and having had to drag his trunk containing all of his worldly possessions from one end of the town and halfway back again, it seemed. He had not been able to afford to pay for a private carriage or sedan chair, or even an unemployed stevedore from the docks, to ease his burden. His finances were a finite resource, until he was qualified at least, and not a bottomless pot to be dipped into whenever he felt the passing need.

Dieter was aware of movement in the room beyond and then the door opened. Standing in the doorway, the bare wood and lathe and plaster of the attic rooms visible behind him, was a tall, gangly youth, about Dieter’s age but possibly older, judging by the undisguised embittered expression of world-weariness on his face. He obviously did not appreciate being disturbed.

The young man was wearing an ill-fitting robe that was patently too short for his gangling frame. It was worn and threadbare in places, most obviously at the knees and elbows. He looked gaunt and as if he had not eaten well for some time. His hair was greasy and untidy. In his long-fingered hands he held a scrawny, ginger cat, which looked as if it had eaten only slightly better than the youth.

“Yes?” the youth asked irritably.

“Um,” Dieter hesitated, “I’m the new lodger. I’m sharing your rooms.” He was feeling the strain in his arm from holding the trunk at the top of the bare floor-boarded stairs.

“And you are?”

The cat gave Dieter a wild-eyed look, as it might regard a scampering mouse.

“Heydrich. Dieter Heydrich.”

“So old Frau Keeler’s found someone fool enough to share this draughty garret, has she? I suppose you’d better come in then.”

The gaunt young man moved back into the room, allowing Dieter to haul his trunk over the threshold but not offering to help in any way.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Dieter said, hesitantly polite.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you,” the youth replied. “The name’s Karlsen. Erich Karlsen.”

The mop-haired youth closed the door behind Dieter and then looked the hopeful physician’s apprentice up and down.

“So, what brings you to Bögenhafen? You’re not native, that’s for sure. That Reikland country burr is a dead giveaway.”

“I-I have come to train at the physicians’ guild,” Dieter said nervously but with an element of pride. “Frau Keeler mentioned that you were a. student of medicine yourself.”

“For my sins,” Erich replied, fixing Dieter with an almost suspicious look as he stroked the cat in his arms.

Dieter couldn’t help feeling slightly despondent, as his idealised image of what it would be like to train as a healer at Bögenhafen’s renowned physicians’ guild took another knock. It obviously showed in his face.

“Look, there’s no need to look like that, it’s not terminal, you know,” Erich said, casting his expressive eyes at the ceiling. “My advice is get back onboard the coach that brought you here and go back to wherever you came from. You’ll have a much more rewarding life that way I can assure you.”

“What’s the guild like then?” Dieter couldn’t help asking.

“An institution of old men whose minds are stagnating in their own preposterous arrogance.”

Dieter looked at Erich, appalled. Erich could hardly miss the look of innocent horror.

“It’s all right if you don’t mind being given all the cesspit jobs to do.”

“You are not enjoying your apprenticeship at the guild?”

“I have decided that it is a tedious and tiresome profession. Your time is spent studying dry, over-written, out-dated texts recommended by unimaginative, tiresome, out-dated, age-addled lecturers and you’ll be lucky if you even get to look at a living flesh and blood patient in your first year. But even that is more interesting than cleaning up after the senior guild members, rather than actually practising medicine for yourself.”

Erich was pacing across the garret now, like an actor speaking his soliloquy on the stage. He was stroking the cat behind its ears as he did so.

“Some get to try out their skills on the poor unfortunates imprisoned within the infirmary at the Temple of Shallya, of course, wretched souls who no longer have any family left to care for them—or at least none that actually care what happens to them. But even then as an apprentice you’re only working under direction from the guild masters. No, they’re all a waste of space if you ask me.”

“What of the master of the guild, Professor Theodrus?”

“He’s the worst of the lot. Anything he has to say is a criminal waste of the air we breathe, if you ask me, which, I would hasten to add before you look at me like that again, you did.”

For a moment neither of them said anything.

“So what’s Bögenhafen like?” Dieter asked at last to break the conversational impasse the two new roommates had seemed to reach.

“All right if you don’t mind the smell. In the summer the river, not to mention the open sewers that run down half the streets, stinks to high heaven and in the winter the mists coming off the Bögen get so thick you can’t even see the hand in front of your face. And the chill wind will freeze your bones to the marrow—especially in this place,” he concluded, indicating the attic space with a roll of his eyes.

Dieter’s disappointment grew, but he had to admit that he felt colder here than he had waking up as the draughty carriage approached Bögenhafen that morning.

He paced sullenly across the attic, leaving his trunk where it was, and looked out of the grimy pane of the nearest of a pair of dormer windows. He found himself looking east across the rooftops of the town towards the looming shadow of the town wall. This part of Bögenhafen was an overcrowded region of crumbling towers and tenements that had been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair over the last few hundred years, away, as they were, from the commercial and administrative centres of the town, and riddled with a maze of hidden, half-forgotten alleyways and rat-runs, some of the buildings connected by apparently inaccessible buttressed footbridges and wooden staircases clinging to the mouldering brickwork.

Beyond the black line of the wall battlements, the watery yellow-ochre disc of the sun had become a line of wan colour outlining the parapet of the wall. Dieter realised he had lost all track of time during the course of his eventful day, first having to wait at the guild for what seemed like an eternity whilst his application was processed—the porter having determined that Dieter was not an envoy from one of the more politically important noble houses requesting a doktor’s aid for his lord and master—and then having to search out lodgings in the town.

“Look, enough of this. I’m even starting to depress myself. Let’s go for a drink.”

Erich dropped the cat, which gave a yowl as it landed on the floor, hissed at its fickle master and then stalked off beyond a partition to where Dieter could see the foot of an unmade bed.

“Oh… um… all right,” Dieter hazarded. He wasn’t used to that sort of thing. To tell the truth he wasn’t used to socializing at all, nor was he at ease with it.

There had only been one drinking house in Hangenholz and Dieter had not been comfortable going there. Everyone had known who he was and his father would inevitably find out about it. A village tavern was not the kind of establishment a priest of Morr would choose to spend time in—at least not Albrecht Heydrich—so neither should his son. But Dieter was his own man now, and although it still might not be the kind of thing he was used to doing, he did not want to alienate his new roommate, who he would have to spend so much time with and the one person he even remotely knew in a strange and overwhelming city.

“Where should we go?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, country boy,” Erich said, smiling for the first time since he and Dieter had met, although it was an expression that spoke to Dieter of even more uncomfortable situations to come. “I know a place.”

 

“What did you think of the lecture?” Dieter heard a voice ask breathlessly at his shoulder. The accent was native to the town Bögenhafen itself.

Dieter looked round to see another student trotting to catch up with him as they left the lecture chamber. He looked to be the same age as Dieter, with a tidy head of blond hair and fuzz of a beard on his chin, cut in the way that Dieter believed was the fashion in the Imperial capital of Nuln. He was obviously also a stone or two heavier than the more wiry young man from Hangenholz. The student was clutching a half-open scrip to his chest, parchment and quill pen spilling out of it.

“Fascinating. Better than I had expected.”

“Better than you had expected? What do you mean by that?”

“Oh… It doesn’t matter. In truth it was everything I had hoped it would be.”

“Professor Theodrus is certainly an excellent speaker, isn’t he?”

“He is obviously a highly intelligent man and extremely knowledgeable.”

“Extremely,” the other young man agreed enthusiastically. “Was this your first lecture here?”

“Yes. Yours too?”

“Oh yes, absolutely.”

The two men came to a halt in the passageway outside the operating theatre-cum-lecture room, as the bustle of the other students continued to wash past them.

“Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself,” Dieter’s conversation companion said, proffering him an outstretched palm, at the same time almost dropping his bulging scrip as he let go with one hand. “Leopold Hanser.”

“Dieter Heydrich.” Dieter uncertainly offered the other his own hand in return and the two of them shook. This was a very different greeting to the one he had received from his fellow lodger, Erich Karlsen.

“Where are you from?” Leopold asked in a friendly manner.

“Hangenholz. It’s a small place. You won’t have heard of it. It’s about six leagues from Bögenhafen.”

“Have you been in Bögenhafen long?”

“Three days.”

“So what do you think of the guild?”

“It’s incredible, truth be told.”

“Yes, I would have to agree with that diagnosis, as Professor Theodrus would say,” Leopold chuckled.

“I take it you’re from Bögenhafen yourself?”

“That’s correct. I live with my mother, a widow. I’m the man of the house now; have been since the age of thirteen. But my father’s inheritance won’t last forever. So I’m putting myself through the guild, following in my father’s footsteps, as it were. He was a respected doktor. And now I’m making a career for myself.”

“I suppose this—the guild, Bögenhafen—is nothing new to someone like yourself,” Dieter said, almost admiringly.

“Oh I don’t know about that. This town has its fair share of excitements for citizen and visitor alike. I expect you have already heard tell of the Corpse Taker.”

“The Corpse Taker?” Dieter repeated, anxiety etching itself across his pale expression of uncertainty. “N-No. I haven’t.”

“Well I’m surprised by that revelation, friend Dieter,” Leopold said and then took him to one side of the passageway, conspiratorially. “It’s all the talk amongst the guild students at the moment, since the second body disappeared from Morr’s mortuary in the cemetery since Hexensnacht.”

Dieter felt a shiver pass involuntarily down his spine like a drop of ice water. Hexensnacht was as reviled as the New Year’s Day of Hexenstag was celebrated. It was a night when both the moons of Mannslieb and Morrslieb were full in the sky. It was a night when even the most hardened cynics stayed out of the eerie moonlight cast by the twin satellites, for it was during the hours of darkness that all manner of evil made its way through the world of men, a night when spirits walked and daemons held sway. It was the Witching Night.

“They say Father Hulbert was up in arms about it. He’s petitioned the town council to post men-at-arms at the entrance to Morr’s field to stop it happening again.”

“Father Hulbert?”

“The attendant priest of Morr.”

“So who is this Corpse Taker?” Dieter asked, unnerved.

“The name originates from a folktale told to children by their parents to scare them and keep them in line. But now it seems that the Corpse Taker is no nursery bogeyman after all. The first bodies began to go missing as the old year died. Three in the space of as many months. The first was hardly missed. The body belonged to that of a hanged criminal. The second was apparently a beggar who had died of exposure, outside the Temple of Shallya of all places. The third was that of a man pulled out of the Bögen. But now there have been two more disappearances in the space of a week, both from the mortuary chapel of the cemetery itself.”

“But who would do such a thing?” Dieter asked, appalled. “And why?”

“Botolphus, apprentice to Doktor Fitzgarten, overheard some of the senior members talking in Fitzgarten’s office. They fear it is the work of necromancers.”

Dieter felt the blood drain from his cheeks.

Necromancers, he thought. The very bane of all life and of his father’s life in particular. He had heard his father say as much on several occasions. They were the blight of Morr and the mortal enemies of his guardian priesthood.

Dieter even loathed the idea of them. That anyone should wish to tamper with Morr’s plan and desecrate the final resting places of the dead, and then on top of that to bring the dead back to unholy, inhuman life for their own gain, to further their own insidious plans, was unthinkable to him.

He had come to a town where a madman, murderer or even a summoner of the dead terrorised the watches of the night. And three days ago Bögenhafen had seemed to offer him so much promise. Now the thought of spending another night in the town unsettled him deeply.

 

Erich Karlsen had also heard the rumours about the Corpse Taker. He, however, was less taken in by the idea that the phantom bodysnatcher was a practitioner of the black arts.

“There are all manner of physicians and surgeons working within a town this size,” he said one evening as Dieter found himself treating Erich to another flagon at the Cutpurse’s Hands. “And they’re not all licensed by the guild, mark my words. Progressive thinkers or dangerous madmen, they all need to get the bodies they use in their studies from somewhere. And there are plenty desperate and immoral enough to do their dirty work for them, exhuming corpses from their graves for a small fee.”

Erich took another swig from his tankard and fixed Dieter with a knowing look. “Not everything untoward that happens in this world is down to dark magic. There is evil enough in the hearts of men without the need for necromancers and daemons as well.”

As the days of their mutual confinement in the garret quarters had passed, Dieter found himself warming towards the slovenly, rebellious Erich. There was something secretly charismatic about the unruly apprentice physician. And for his part, Erich seemed to enjoy having someone as young and naive, and as easily impressed or shocked, as Dieter. New to the uncaring life of a busy market town and still for the most part innocent to the ways of the world, Erich could regale Dieter with his stories of an exuberantly youthful excess in a town that had almost anything a rebellious young man could want on offer. Erich also had a captive audience when he wanted to espouse on what he thought was wrong with the world or rather, the physicians’ guild, or the guild of fossils as he preferred to call it. It soon became apparent to Dieter that the reason why Erich could not afford to live anywhere better was because he had found other things to spend his allowance on. He had frittered it away on the good life, wild carousing rather than comfortable accommodation.

Their lodgings were in a street off the Eisen Bahn, in one of the poorer parts of the city, but it was the only place Dieter, or Erich, could afford to live. There were three other people sharing the crumbling tenement with them. Frau Keeler, their harridan of a landlady, lived on the ground floor of the building. She had told Dieter that the rooms on the first floor were let to a noted playwright and actor, one Franz Liebervitz. In truth Liebervitz was a weirdroot user with a fondness for seducing the latest young starlet to try to find fame in the theatre. The second floor apartments were used on an occasional basis by one of the town’s most highly regarded merchants, who Frau Keeler assured Dieter she was too discreet to name, for his cousin to stay during her frequent visits to Bögenhafen from the Imperial Court in Nuln. That left only the rooms on the third floor, really nothing more than the spartanly decorated attic of the crumbling lodging house, where Dieter and Erich resided in their thinly partitioned rooms. All of the apartments could be accessed from a rickety wooden staircase that ran up the entire height of the building, from a front door that opened directly onto the stinking refuse channel street of Dunst Strasse.

 

So this was what life in Bögenhafen was like, Dieter considered as he tried to get to sleep that night, in an uncomfortable bed in draughty lodgings, in a town full of people who seemed either not to like him without even having to meet him—apart from Leopold and Erich—and with a body snatcher, or possibly worse, on the loose. Dieter could not help feeling a little disappointment. His dream was not quite all he hoped it would be in reality.

But at least he was finding his feet at the physicians’ guild now. Nothing could truly quash his enthusiasm for the path he had set himself upon, and that was all that truly mattered. After only two or three years his training would be complete and he could return to Hangenholz and his beloved sister Katarina.

He saw her face now as his eyelids closed, her swan neck and almond eyes so like their mother’s, her shining hair, the sheen of her dark tresses like moonlight on a lake at midnight, framing her delicate, pale features. So like their mother. So unlike their father. And then, unbidden, the crow-black figure of his love-lacking father came into sharp focus in his mind’s eye.

No longer would he just be the loner son of Albrecht Heydrich, priest of Morr, Dieter determined. He would be Dieter Heydrich, doktor of physick, Healer of Hangenholz. Yes, he liked the sound of that. Hunched under his rough-haired blanket on the thin straw mattress of his bed he tried the title out in his mind, as weary sleep pulled at him.

Yes. Dieter Heydrich—Doktor Heydrich—the doktor of Hangenholz.

And then as sleep took him at last, one last, haunting image swam into his mind and his dreams. It was a face he had never seen before, one he could never have seen before. A horrific bandaged face with one baleful yellow eye peering through the bloodstained rags, its mouth a mess of drawn back gums and rotting elongated teeth. But he knew who it was nonetheless, although he knew not its import at that time.

It was the face of the Corpse Taker.