VORGEHEIM
Post Mortem

 

 

It is a commonly held misconception that, because of their dealings with the world of the dead, necromancers hate life. This could not be further from the truth!

Those who pursue the art of necromancy might well spend years plundering the burial places of the dead—neglected graveyards, foetid charnel houses, ancient barrow mounds and dusty desert necropolises—shunning daylight in favour of the cloaking shadow of night and the company of the living for that of mouldering corpses. But the rationale for this behaviour is so that they might cling on to life—what life they have—with the tenacity of a gut-lodged tapeworm.

Some, it is true, come to necromancy by mistake. They desire knowledge for its own sake, or seek to save their own lives or that of a loved one. Perhaps it is also true that many who come to practise the dark art are inclined to madness and dark desires, for what else could bring them to the study of the most base and vile form of the mage’s art? However, there is something about their proscribed pursuit that invariably turns them to the dark path.

And then there are some for whom the study of necromancy is undertaken purely out of an intrinsically evil purpose to bring about the end of others, perhaps even that of the world. Such creatures are the vile leech-sorcerers of vampire-kind, the necrarchs, W’soran take them all!

A pox on their accursed kind! May their damned souls never find rest until Morrslieb crashes to earth and obliterates our world!

No, necromancers love life with an unbearable passion. They crave it. And why are they so desperate to cling to the deathless semblance of life they strive to maintain? Because the only emotion they feel more strongly than an obsessive desire for life, or power, or mastery of the dark arts, or to satisfy a savage lust for murder and slaughter, is a total, unholy fear of the alternative—an abject, mortal fear of death itself!

Oh, how they dread the deathly touch of Morr’s cold hand. For all necromancers know that when Morr comes for them there will be no peace for those who would defile the final resting places of the dead, who would disturb the eternal sleep of the dead, who would—if their will were done—overturn nature and defy the god of death and dreams. For them, only the agonising torment of an eternity in limbo awaits.

 

The two men stood outside the dead-eyed house again. This time Dieter had been the one who was determined to return to the decaying town house: it was he who was the driving force behind the venture and it had been Erich who had needed cajoling to accompany him. In the end it had been a combination of alcohol and the guilty knowledge that he was responsible for getting the younger man into this situation in the first place that ensured Erich followed Dieter back to Apothekar Allee as dusk was falling on the evening of the third day of Vorgeheim.

It was whilst they were sitting in the Cutpurse’s Hands, Erich summoning the courage to fulfil the promise he had made to his once impressionable roommate, and with Dieter desperate for them to get on their way, that Erich had produced the knife. It was not so much a knife as a stiletto dagger—ten inches of black steel. He had dulled the blade with soot so that if it were necessary to go into the house armed, the weapon wouldn’t reflect any light and give the two of them away.

Dieter didn’t know how Erich had come by the dagger and he didn’t ask. Once he might have been shocked to see that Erich had a knife. Now it just seemed like a sensible precaution, all things considered.

The last rays of a dying sun stained the windows of surrounding buildings crimson, like blood clouding in water. As dusk’s shadows crawled along the street and thickened in the narrow spaces between the tenements, Dieter and Erich found that the window they had used to break into the house the first time was just as they had left it weeks before. Nothing had been done to secure it, so that Dieter could almost have believed that there was nobody living in the house at all, except that he knew otherwise now. He could feel it in his bones, deep in the very core of his being.

This time it was Dieter who led the way inside, wasting no time as the cerise stain of sunset above the western horizon darkened to purple. It was Erich who hung back anxiously, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds as he lingered in the alleyway, convinced that they might be seen or terrified of what might be waiting for them in the dark. It was the same sense of guilt tinged with a morbid fascination that had been awoken in him too that led him to eventually enter the house after Dieter, who seemed to no longer need his company for reassurance and to bolster his confidence.

Dieter did not delay in the spartan room but went immediately to the door. Peering through the crack Dieter could see no one on the stairs or the dark-panelled landing. Listening, he could hear nothing. He crept out of the room and across the landing, past the door to the esoteric library, only stopping when he reached the top of the staircase that led down to the ground floor of the house.

Dieter could feel his heart thumping loudly in his chest, but he inhaled deeply, through his nose, concentrating on keeping his pulse steady. His hand on the dark-stained banister, he began to descend the staircase. He didn’t quite know why, but some instinct buried deep within him told him that was the way he wanted to go.

Then Erich was there, his worried face peering down at him from the turn of the stair from the floor above.

“What are you doing?” he hissed.

Dieter looked back up at Erich, fixing him with a dagger-tipped stare.

“Be quiet,” he replied, his voice low. “What does it look like?”

“Do we really need to be here?” Erich was leaning half over the banister, reluctant to go any further himself.

“I have to find out who Doktor Drakus is.”

Dieter continued to slowly descend the staircase. A board creaked beneath his foot and he froze, but no sound came from anywhere within the strange house. He heard a pattering on the threadbare carpet on the stairs and then Erich was behind him, both of them now standing in the tiled hallway of the ground floor.

“Is that really it?” Erich challenged him. “Is that really why we’re here? Are you sure you are not looking for the answers to deeper, more far-reaching problems?”

“I have to know if Drakus is the Corpse Taker,” Dieter whispered.

Erich’s appalled expression remained.

“But who is Drakus?”

Dieter suddenly sharply shushed Erich.

The other student froze. Neither said anything. Their senses strained to breaking point, their eyes adjusting to the gloom of the passageway, they could see marks on the walls showing where paintings and portraits must once have hung. But what scenes had they depicted? Whose portraits had been displayed here?

And as half his mind considered the missing paintings, Dieter heard muffled voices; distinct enough that he could be certain he was hearing them, yet indistinct enough to not know what was being said. Erich made as if he was about to turn and flee. Dieter grabbed his sleeve.

“We are not done here,” he said, his voice quiet but dripping with menace.

Taking measured, silent steps, Dieter led the way along the passageway towards the back of the house. There was a door to his right, under the stairs. Pressing an ear to the door, he could hear the voices more clearly. There seemed to be a regular rhythm to them now. It sounded like chanting. But what part of a doktor’s work could require him to chant?

Dieter couldn’t have stopped now if he wanted to; his obsessive inquisitiveness wouldn’t let him. It gripped him and wouldn’t let him go, like a dog with a marrowbone. Dieter put his hand to the door and eased it open, teeth gritted against the hinges squeaking. The door swung open. Before him a set of worn stone steps descended into the basement of the house, faintly illuminated by a flickering light source somewhere beneath him. A gust of chill air rose from the cellar, smelling of mould and putrefaction.

It seemed that Erich couldn’t leave him now either. His blade gleamed dully in his hand, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the knife’s hilt. They were both in this until the end, until Morr only knew what resolution to their investigation awaited them.

Dieter continued downwards, the chanting voices becoming clearer with each step. He still did not understand what words were being chanted; they seemed to be in a language he did not understand. But as he heard the words he felt his scalp tighten and the hairs on his head stand on end. The sound made a chill seep into every pore.

Dieter was abruptly aware that his teeth were chattering. He bit down hard, clamping them together. Was it really that cold beneath the house, or was it something else?

The stone steps ended and another passageway began, this one faced with crumbling bricks, slick with algae and water. The ceiling was strung with cobwebs bearing the skeletal husks of spiders. The light flickered at the other end of the passage. By following this path Dieter risked coming face-to-face with whoever was in the basement, probably Doktor Drakus. But he could not help himself now.

Before he really knew it, he was peering around the archway at the other end of the passage into the vault beyond. More steps descended to the floor of the chamber whilst to his right a low arched gallery ran around two sides of the chamber.

It was said that Bögenhafen was built on top of the ruins of previous settlements. Erich himself had once told him over a flagon of ale in the Cutpurse’s Hands that a long-forgotten order of Templar knights—he had not known their name—had once had a seminary within the environs of the dock on the River Bögen and had buried their dead in catacombs dug out beneath it. It seemed that the basement connected to part of these rumoured catacombs.

Dieter ducked into the gallery and crouched down, half-hidden by an arch. Erich followed him. From their vantage point Dieter could see clearly into the vault. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more the place reminded him of a crypt.

Erich’s breathing was shallow and noisy. Dieter glared at him and Erich, realising suddenly what he was doing, clamped his mouth shut. The two students then peered down into the chamber below and were appalled by what they saw.

The first thing that drew Dieter’s eye was the naked, greening corpse stretched out on the bloodstained table at the centre of the chamber. The gore-encrusted, grainy wood looked more like a butcher’s block than an autopsy table. It could not possibly be the body that he had seen the grave robbers steal from the cemetery of Morr’s field. That had been two months ago and this body was distinctly fresher. It had to be another, unless it had been subject to some embalming process.

The body was that of a man who had reached his fourth decade before he died, by the looks of things. A dark red incision that ran from below the dead man’s neck to his groin showed that the corpse had been gutted.

Standing at the head of the autopsy table was someone Dieter recognised. It was the manservant who had admitted the body snatchers to the house on that fateful night back on the second of Sigmarzeit. His cadaverous features made him look like he had more in common with the body on the slab than either Dieter or Erich. His hair was thinning and his visible scalp was marked with liver spots. He had the look of an ancient family retainer about him; the kind of servant who had seen at least three generations pass on their way without ever seeming to age himself, already seeming old to begin with.

It was clear that this cadaverous creature was nothing more than the manservant, for the real force at work here was the man Dieter assumed to be Doktor Drakus, or at least the man who went by that name. Whilst the manservant stood at the end of the table, holding a lantern over the body, the surgeon himself was leaning over the cavity in the eviscerated corpse, his back to the two uninvited observers.

Dieter’s heart skipped a beat. What was it he was witnessing here? The gruesome scene laid out beneath him, carried out in such clandestine conditions certainly suggested dark practices were being employed. But then Dieter disengaged his emotions and let wild speculation be superseded by rational thought, and he took in the rest of his surroundings.

Laid out on benches and trestle tables around the basement, within reach of the doktor as he worked, were the tools of his trade. Many of the accoutrements on display were those that Dieter would expect to be used by a doktor or a surgeon: knives, bone-cutting saws, long-handled tweezers, bowls of dirty water with blood-stained rags left soaking in them. The majority of these items were rusting, or crusted with strings of gore. And yet there were as many other instruments, the purpose for which they had been designed Dieter could barely begin to imagine.

Amongst these there was a clay mannequin of a human figure stuck with steel pins, a severed human hand mounted on a wooden stand, burning tallow wicks stuck in the tips of its fingers, and something that looked like the skeleton of an infant poised upon a wire frame to make it look like it was dancing a macabre jig. The addition of a bony tail and horns to the skeleton only served to make it look even more disturbing.

Dieter also noticed a heavy tome lying open on another table and tacked to a wall a curious drawing of a human figure marked with inexplicable lines. It was as though they mapped energy centres in the body. The chart was annotated with vertical columns of an even stranger script made up of crossed pen-brush lines. The image of the man looked like the description he had once heard of the race that lived in mysterious Cathay, far away to the east.

Both the doktor and his manservant were chanting. The eerie sound echoed around the vault, amplifying the sound and making it seem even more eerie, unnatural and inhuman.

The doktor straightened, turning to reach for something on the workbench behind him. For the first time Dieter saw his face. He stifled a gasp and glanced at Erich, but his companion was too terrified to make a sound. It was not who he had half been expecting to see. Erich was simply staring in open-mouthed horror at the man. Dieter’s own morbid fascination compelled him to look again.

Doktor Drakus was tall and lean, not unlike Erich in build. He was wearing a filthy robe, stained almost black in places by dried blood and other fluids, but made notable by the esoteric glyphs picked out in gold thread on the collar and lapels. His tapered fingertips and filed nails made his hands look more like talons. But it was the man’s face that made Dieter’s stomach knot in repulsion and dread.

Drakus’ head was completely bald. Instead of hair his shrivelled scalp was covered with suppurating green buboes, crusted with mouldering black scabs. One oozing canker obscured much of his right eye. An open sore at the corner of his drawn lips made it look like the mouth split open almost to his ear on the left side. Some flesh-eating disease had eaten away much of the soft tissue of his nose so that Dieter could practically see the denuded bone underneath. The man looked like a victim of the most terrible plague.

Almost as an afterthought Dieter put his hand to his mouth. If there was plague here he and Erich should get away as quickly as possible, before they were infected. Perhaps they were already too late? Perhaps they were already carrying the terrible disease simply by having entered the house? But then again, the doktor’s manservant showed no signs of illness.

There was talk of plague in nearby towns and villages. Could the two be connected? And yet even though Dieter knew that he should get away, he could not tear himself away from the disturbing ritual he was witnessing. The doktor was now suturing the split in the corpse’s midriff. He and Erich watched transfixed as the doktor worked.

Dieter kept telling himself that this could still just be a doktor about his Shallya-ordained business. He assured himself that the buboes and lesions on the doktor’s face were merely symptoms of some other non-contagious disease that the unfortunate wretch was suffering from. He kept trying to convince himself that the chanting, the carving up of the body and the unsettling artefacts were all simply part of some new medical procedure. He kept telling himself that there was nothing to really fear here. He failed on all counts.

But he dared not admit to himself what he was witnessing.

He was sure that he had discovered the lair of the Corpse Taker.

The doktor had finished sewing up the gaping hole in the cadaver and now he was making strange hand gestures over the body, the chanting growing in intensity. This curious procedure made Dieter feel sick to the pit of his stomach. Each gesture the doktor made burnt itself into his memory. The incomprehensible words of the chanting reverberated through his mind as if they were somehow familiar to him.

As the mantra went on, the atmosphere in the cellar-laboratory changed perceptibly. Dieter could feel a static charge building within his own body, as if caught in the middle of a nascent thunderstorm. He felt the shadows thicken around him. The air itself had taken on a cloying quality. It seemed greasy and tainted.

Seen out of the corners of his eyes as he watched the doktor and the ritual taking place before him, the impenetrable darkness that would not be beaten back from the corners of the vault seemed to run out like an oil slick across the ceiling and the crumbling walls, gradually enveloping the room, as if the shadows were trying to quench what little, inconstant light there was.

Erich was whimpering now but Dieter heard the sound as if he were a dispassionate observer and did nothing to stop him. His whole being was too intently locked on the scene in front of him. It seemed to Dieter that there were things moving in the spreading shadows. There was the impression of clawing hands reaching towards the doktor and the corpse on the table. And now he thought he could hear another sound in the cellar accompanying the chanting, a susurrating whisper like the rattling of insect wing cases, disembodied voices chattering insistently from beyond the other side of the veil of existence.

A familiar acrid smell assailed his nostrils now: Erich had lost control of his bladder.

Dieter could feel a terrible pressure building behind his eyeballs. As the shadows grew, images and thoughts entered his head unbidden. Grinning death’s-head skulls. His father intoning a prayer as he prepared a body for burial. Sticking a knife into the guts of another and twisting. Lank-haired corpses swinging from crossroad gibbets. Dark tombs ripe with the stink of decay. Scattering shovelfuls of grave-dirt on a struggling, gagged body bound in a filthy shroud. Soil and stones skittering from the mounds of freshly dug graves as the things buried within tried to push free of their damp earth prisons. Rat-eaten bodies jerking with unnatural life. Cutting the hands from a hanged man. Albrecht Heydrich lying cold in his bed, his last breath having left him and along with it the vital spark of life. Removing mouldering, black organs from a butchered carcass. Battlefields strewn with the fallen as the ravens made their feast. Fashioning a creature from the pieces of other dead things. The images were familiar, not frightening.

The pressure continued to build. And now it was as if he were caught in the middle of a great gale that howled across the world, sweeping over ancient battle sites, barrow-tombs, hangman’s scaffolds, cemeteries and massacred villages, saturated with doom and despair, carrying death in its wings. The cold, dark wind whipped at his robes, tugged at his hair, even blew through him.

Dieter was now standing, reaching out to the shadows. And it was as if the shadows were drawn to him, channelling through him, filling his mind with the horrific thoughts and images, borne from all the darkest places of the world.

He was barely aware of anything else happening around him. He heard Erich’s screams as if he was in another room. Then he was screaming too, in physical and mental anguish. Darkness consumed him and the true horror began.

 

Dieter woke with a start and a strangled cry. He sat bolt upright, the nightmarish vision of a host of the undead—an army—dragging their rotten bodies out of their graves and marching towards him across bleak moorland still fresh in his mind. He was drenched in sweat and there was a foul burning taste in his mouth, suggesting he had been sick. His head was pounding, as if in the grip of a stinking hangover.

As he blinked the retina-seared images of the deathly faces from his eyes, awareness of his surroundings returned and with them bewilderment, anxiety and fear. The last thing he remembered with any clarity was being crouched in the darkness under the house in Apothekar Allee, the overwhelming images of death, the black sickness filling him as the pox-ridden doktor invoked powers best left undisturbed.

What he could not remember was anything after that, other than the horrific nightmares in which the restless dead pursued him relentlessly. Dieter looked at the familiar surroundings of his room in the attic of Frau Keeler’s lodging house. He could not remember returning there.

He certainly didn’t know how he had got back. At the present time he did not even know what day it was, although from the bright summer sunshine beating in through the dormer windows the time was somewhat after nine o’ clock in the morning.

And there was so much more that he did not know. Had he and Erich been seen by Doktor Drakus as he performed his dark ritual? Whether they had or not, how could he be here now, with no memory of what had followed? They must have been seen. But if they had, how had he managed to get back to his lodgings? Had he contracted the plague from the disease-riddled man? Was the sickness taking root within him even now, condemning him to a slow, agonising death?

Had it all been a nightmare? It had seemed so realistic and yet at the same time so had his waking dream about Erich after they had first visited the house of Doktor Drakus. Had they even been to visit it a second time or had he simply dreamed it all? Dieter’s head was in a spin. He was finding it hard to trust his own senses now.

Another thought crossed his mind: where was Erich?

Dieter climbed out of bed. He was still dressed; only his cloak and boots had been removed before he went to bed. He stumbled through to the other lodger’s room. The door was closed.

Dieter knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again.

“E-Erich? Are you there?”

Nothing. Dieter tried the handle. The door was locked.

“Erich?” he called, thumping on the door with the flat of his hand.

“Go away.”

“Erich, are you all right? W-What happened last night?”

“Go away!”

“But we need to talk about this. I need to talk about what happened.”

“Go away!” Erich screamed. “Go away! Go away!”

Dieter slumped against the door and slid down it to the floor. He felt sick. The pounding of his headache was now an intense needling migraine behind his eyes that made him wince.

Cold realisation hit him. Whatever had happened beneath the house of Doktor Drakus, it had been for real. And there was one thing he was certain of, without knowing how. Something had changed within him. And he very much doubted it had changed for the better.

And it seemed that the change had not just happened inside him. Somehow the candle-flame he lit in his room that night seemed not to hold back the darkness so well. When he eventually ventured out into Bögenhafen again, the streets seemed darker around him. The whole town seemed more greatly steeped in inconstant shadows.

The world had changed irrevocably for Dieter Heydrich.

 

Erich did not emerge from his room for several days, not until the ninth day of Vorgeheim. In all that time Dieter himself barely left the lodging house, only going out to bring back food and drink; even then he made sure he covered his face with the cowl of his cloak, despite the foetid summer heat, in case he should be spotted by the watch and identified as a house-breaker. And if not by the watch, by other eyes with death in their cold gaze.

Dieter was afraid of contact with others and he certainly dared not return to the guild, in case word had somehow got back to them of his nefarious nighttime activities. The other students and senior members would ask too many questions, pry too deeply. And what if Drakus had secret contacts within the guild? And yet there still remained the doubt—the denial, perhaps—in the back of his mind that it had all been some horribly realistic dream.

But he had not been idle in those days of self-confinement. The books he had stolen from Drakus’ library still obsessed him, even more after what he thought he had witnessed beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Dieter filled his notebooks with what he learned, with what he was teaching himself. But he had also begun to record some of the other things he believed he had seen and beard, trying to make sense of them. He drew diagrams to represent the curious hand gestures he had witnessed—the memory of the hand movements was so clear to him, how could they be something he had simply dreamed—and he tried to write down what he had heard the doktor say. He did not even know what language Drakus had been speaking, but he persevered, writing the words phonetically.

When Erich did emerge from his room at last, stinking and unshaven, Dieter soon came to realise that a change had come over his roommate too. It showed in the diamond-sharp look in his eyes and practically all he would talk about was his new obsession with death, to the point where Dieter preferred not to speak with him anymore.

There had been a change in the mood of the populace of Bögenhafen too. There was talk amidst the townspeople of plague in nearby towns, talk that Dieter heard on those few occasions when he ventured out of the garret and the lodging house for supplies. Word was that the plague had reached as far as Kreuzotterfeld, Stimmingen and Vagenholt. Word was that the Sigmarite Templars of the Bögenhafen chapter house had been carrying out a pogrom in the surrounding villages, allegedly uncovering cells of plague-worshippers. Word was that the first cases of Sturp’s ague had been reported in Bögenhafen itself.

Dieter knew that he should have reported what he had seen—what he had thought he had seen—to the witch hunters the very next day. But it was too late now. In fact, he should have gone to the witch hunters before, after the discovery he had made in Drakus’ library or even before that, when he had witnessed the body snatchers at work. It was definitely too late now; the consequences for him were too terrible and final to contemplate. No, he would have to watch and wait this one out alone and unaided.

On the thirteenth day of the month Leopold visited him again. His excuse was that he had been sent by Professor Theodrus to find out what had befallen Dieter, to find out what was going on. Leopold received short shrift, Dieter sending him away without giving him any reason for his recent absence from the guild.

Leopold returned again four days later, insisting he be admitted and that the two apprentices tell him what was going on. On that occasion a raving Erich forcefully expelled him from the lodging house. Leopold stormed off claiming that he would be speaking to the guild and the Temple of Sigmar about the matter.

But still Dieter was plagued by doubts of his own and Erich’s lack of knowledge regarding what had happened on the night of the third day of the month. Whenever he quizzed Erich about it, he either changed the subject or claimed not to have any recollection of what had happened either. This whole state of affairs left Dieter feeling paranoid and unsettled. He had to find out what was going and what part Doktor Drakus had to play in it all, if for no other reason than for his own peace of mind. But would the truth, should he uncover it, truly bring peace of mind?

 

So it was that eventually, on the evening of the twenty-fifth day of Vorgeheim, with the town sheltering through the heat of high summer, Dieter ventured out of his garret hideaway and made his way through the town—avoiding the artisans’ quarter, the Nulner Weg and the Göttenplatz as much as was possible—and returned to the Temple of Shallya.

This time he asked for Anselm Fleischer by name. The plain novice priestess he spoke to knew not that the poor lunatic’s family name was Fleischer, but certainly there was a patient going by the name Anselm in their care. Dieter was glad it was not the stern matron Sister Marilda who met him. He wove a story that he was a distant cousin, come all the way from Talabheim to visit his tormented relation. He half-consciously realised that lying came more easily to him now.

The novice led Dieter back through the infirmary hall and admitted him to a different room to the one in which the poor wretch had been incarcerated before. Even after all that he had seen, the sight of the hollow-eyed, emaciated, prematurely white-haired man still came as a shock to Dieter.

Anselm was sitting on a pallet bed, clad in only a stained linen nightshirt. Dieter was somewhat surprised to see that the madman was no longer restrained by the harness jacket he had seen him wearing the first time they had met. It had been three months since, and the self-inflicted wounds on his legs had healed, after a fashion. He obviously wasn’t considered a danger to himself or others anymore.

The novice left them together, reassuring Dieter that she would not be far away if he needed her. Dieter closed the door as she left.

“Good day to you, sir,” Anselm said, fixing his visitor with a quizzical look. “Pardon me for asking, but do I know you?”

“Yes, Anselm, you do.”

He seemed quite lucid. Dieter was encouraged. Perhaps he would be more successful in this venture than he had at first hoped. Perhaps Anselm would be more receptive to his questions than he had been the last time.

“Well it is very nice to see you again, very pleasant indeed,” the lunatic beamed. “I do not receive many visitors.”

“And it is a pleasure to see you too,” Dieter said with forced joviality. He edged forwards and sat down on the end of Anselm’s bed. “Last time we spoke, you talked of your apprenticeship.”

“Did I?”

“Yes,” Dieter swallowed, his mouth suddenly thick with saliva. “At the physicians’ guild.”

“I was an apprentice there once.” Anselm smiled disarmingly, with all the innocence of a child, and all the lack of guile too.

“Yes, I know. You were under a doktor…”—he almost dared not say it—“Drakus there.”

The smile froze on Anselm’s lips. Then his face fell. “No, not him. Not him.”

“What’s the matter?” Dieter asked, as though making light of the matter.

“D-Doktor D-Dr—”

He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t bring himself to say it.

“Drakus,” Dieter finished for him.

“No!” Anselm snapped, his cry full of anguish. “Not him. Do not mention his name. He’ll find you!” Dieter sensed that the crazed creature was talking to himself again. He started to rock backwards and forwards on the bed. “He’ll come for you. He has your soul already. He’ll come for your mortal flesh as well and carve himself a new body! Physician, heal thyself!”

Dieter knew he had to act quickly before the madman’s cries alerted the priestesses to what he had done.

“What did Drakus do to you, Anselm?”

The wretch locked eyes with Dieter and stopped rocking. “He took my soul.”

“Why? How did he steal your soul?”

“He wanted my body. But all he got was my soul.” Anselm started rocking again. “I’m all right as long as I don’t die. But then I can never die. Not now. Not really. He won’t let me. And if I did, he’d only bring me back again. No, there’s no peace for you. Not now, not ever. You can’t let him find you. You can never let him find you. He has your soul. Your soul!”

His last confession became a scream. Dieter hurriedly got up from the bed in the face of the howling madman. And then Anselm was up, springing off the bed. He yanked the door open and was through it in a flash. Reacting on instinct alone, Dieter followed in the very next moment.

Ahead of him the startled cries, the screams and the howls of the madman himself, told him the whereabouts of the white-haired lunatic. He was fleeing through the infirmary, leaping over beds and barging people out of the way as he made his bid for freedom. A pair of elderly Shallyans tried to halt his flight. Anselm lashed out viciously with fists and feet. Both women were knocked flying. With a crash, a table bearing an earthenware jug and bowl was overturned. The crockery smashed on the flags.

Dieter ran after the wretch. He did not see the water that the jug and bowl had held, and which was now spilt over the infirmary floor, until his feet were slipping out from under him in the spreading puddle. He landed hard on his backside.

By the time he had managed to get back to his feet, Anselm was past all resistance and the last Dieter saw of him was his mane of white hair streaming out behind him, giving him the appearance of some exorcised apparition fleeing into the warm embrace of the night.

 

Amidst the ensuing chaos that followed the lunatic’s flight from the infirmary, Dieter found it easy to slip away from the Temple of Shallya himself. Once out of the courtyard precinct of the temple he turned right, away from the direction in which the guild lay—trying not to look upon the frontage of the grand Temple of Sigmar as he did so—and ducked into Handwerker Bahn. From there he secreted himself in the darkening back streets of the low class residential and commercial district that lay behind the facade of the Göttenplatz and Dreiecke Platz. He was certain that, in the wake of a dangerous lunatic escaping from the Temple of Shallya, there would be a hue and cry throughout the town. And sooner or later, the watch—or worse, the witch hunters—would doubtless become involved and Dieter did not want to find himself caught between them and their quarry, or else he might become the quarry himself.

Working his way back, roughly north-east, through the town, Dieter began to trace a path back to his lodgings, once again taking a long and circuitous indirect route. The night was unusually clear, free from fog and cloud. The veil of the sky above him was speckled with the milk drops of constellations. It was said that some sorcerers could divine meaning from the patterns the distant stars made as they travelled across the firmament of heaven, but Dieter could see nothing but the all-enveloping blackness of night.

He was half-expecting to encounter trouble on his way home, but not the sort of trouble that eventually found him. The first he knew of the ambush was when two figures—one squat and thickset, one tall and muscled like an ox—detached themselves from the shadows of a sunken doorway. He knew them at once.

Neither of the two body snatchers said a word. Neither needed to. The cudgels they held in their hands spoke their intent perfectly clearly. Was it chance that they had happened upon him or had they been hunting him all night? Did a lone scholar on his own at night present them with an easier option than ransacking a grave for a body, or was their purpose purely to do away with him?

Dieter tensed, ready to run. The two brutes took a step towards him.

Screaming like a banshee, an apparition clad in white appeared out of the darkness, bounding past Dieter and throwing itself at the shorter of the two grave robbers.

The man staggered backwards and lost his footing as Anselm Fleischer landed on him, ripping open the man’s leather tunic and sinking his nails into the body snatcher’s chest and shoulder. He fell backwards onto the muck splattered cobbles. Anselm gave a feral snarl and sank his teeth into the man’s neck. Blood flowed. The grave robber cried out in anger and pain, trying to beat the madman from him.

“Physician, heal thyself!” the madman growled through a mouthful of flesh.

Confounded by this totally unexpected counter-attack, the larger brute simply watched dumbfounded as the lunatic savaged his companion like some feral beast.

Dieter did not wait to see what happened next. He turned tail and ran.

 

Dieter stopped, panting for breath, hands on his knees. He had no idea where he had run to nor for how long. As he began to recover himself he looked up to see a familiar street sign. He was back at Apothekar Allee again. Doktor Drakus’ abode stood before him. Where it had seemed deathly before there was now something empty about its appearance.

As if his feet had a mind and intent all of their own, Dieter approached the door of the house. It stood slightly ajar. All thought of his visit to the infirmary-temple, the lunatic’s escape and his encounter with the body snatchers was suddenly gone. He put a hand to the door, just as he had done in his dream, and with a moan of seized hinges it swung open before him.

Then he was inside the house, at the top of the slime-slick steps leading down into the tomb-cold basement, then at the bottom of the steps, then at the threshold to the laboratory chamber. And there he saw—

Nothing. The vault was utterly bare, apart from the abandoned lantern. Then, its oil used up at last, the light flickered and died.

Dieter ran back up the stairs into the house. Up to the first floor and into the library; at least where there had once been a library. The books were missing too. The house had been cleared out utterly. And Doktor Drakus was gone.