KALDEZEIT
Down Among the Dead Men

 

 

I have committed all manner of evils in my unnaturally extended life as a necromancer, but the irony is that I was made a necromancer by the misguided actions of others.

When Ernst Krieger accused me of being that dire spectre the Corpse Taker at our first meeting, I was, as yet, innocent of any crime. If that accursed witch hunter had put me to the ordeal of Madame Rack and inevitably found me unjustly guilty, I would have been burnt at the heretic’s stake and died as an innocent, instead of that wretch Anselm Fleischer.

But the true greatest irony is that if the irrational brother-captain had had me put to death, I would not have lived to become the very thing that the witch-hunting Templars of Sigmar set out so puritanically to out destroy. I would not have become the very thing that Krieger had accused me of being.

So I ask you, who was it that drove me to commit so many unspeakable acts of depraved wickedness? Who was it that made me evil? And what is one man’s traitor but another man’s redeemer anyway?

 

The carriage rumbled along the Nuln road under a bruised grey sky. Kaldezeit had arrived in the Reikland, bringing with it near freezing temperatures and lending the icy air the sharp cold smell of death. Ground mist covered the swathes of yellowed meadow that lay beyond the skeletal trees lining the road. Following the bitter frosts of Kaldezeit, in all too little time Bögenhafen would enjoy its first falls of Ulriczeit snow.

But the stagecoach’s only passenger was oblivious to all of this. Dieter Heydrich’s mind was on other things.

It had taken him two weeks to tie up his affairs in Hangenholz and the nearby market-hub of Karltenschloss so that everything would be ready for him when he returned from Bögenhafen. Back in Hangenholz, Dieter had begun to treat those for whom the plague had been a life-threatening condition. And his patients had started to get better. He had begun to feel part of the community there for the first time in years. He had also slept well for the first time in as long as he could remember, his dreams no longer haunted by the restless dead.

With the black pox all but eradicated in Hangenholz, Dieter had set off for Bögenhafen for the last time, on the thirtieth day of Brauzeit. The coaching companies were still not able to run a full service and besides, business was slow. But eventually Dieter had persuaded a number of different drivers to carry him on short legs of the journey so that on the afternoon of Wellentag, the second day of Kaldezeit, he came within sight of the market town’s ominously looming walls again.

He remembered the excitement he had felt when he had first seen those towering battlements. Now the sight left him feeling cold, with a bitter taste in his mouth. There was nothing here for him now.

Dieter could not return to the guild; too many questions would be asked. Too many people knew too much or had too great an interest invested in the one they had called the Daemon’s Apprentice. And that was assuming that he would be welcome there; that Professor Theodrus would accept his prodigal protégé back into the fold. No, too much water had flowed under that bridge which Dieter had then quite successfully burnt.

Dieter still had what was left of his father’s money but there was no place for him in Bögenhafen. Brother-Captain Krieger was still securely ensconced within the templar chapter house, as far as he knew, and he would always be watched.

He was as much an outcast from the town and the guild, as he had been as a child, the son of a priest of Morr, living in Hangenholz. Dieter was giving up on the dream that had become a nightmare. After all, he had nothing to lose anymore.

But there was also hope in his heart, in spite of all this. He had decided upon the course he wanted his life to take. He had been wrong to ever leave Hangenholz, and there was a place for him there now, a role to fulfil, helping to rebuild the plague-ravaged community. Dieter was also beginning to give credence to the old adage that some good really could come out of any evil. He would put all the skills and knowledge he had acquired at the guild of physicians to good use back in Hangenholz.

 

Frau Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse was empty when he arrived. Having let himself into the attic room, Dieter half-expected to meet a crazed, pox-eaten, Erich and have to explain to him why he was leaving Bögenhafen. But no matter what his fellow apprentice of the dark arts said or did, Dieter was not going to be dissuaded from his chosen course of action.

But Erich wasn’t there.

Dieter glanced into the chaos and clutter that was Erich’s dark-shuttered room. Having seen that the youth wasn’t there, he did not want to linger any longer. Seeing the dissected bats, toads and rats pinned out on every conceivable surface—from the walls to the very head of Erich’s bed—brought back too many unpleasant memories; memories that he was trying his very best to expunge from his mind altogether.

It also smelt like something had died in the room. Dieter just wondered how many somethings it had actually been.

It was hard to determine how long it had been since anyone had been in the garret apartment. It could have been anything from several weeks to only that very morning; the place was in such a state of disarray.

Dieter found his own room just as he had left it on the day he had received Josef Wohlreich’s summons to Hangenholz. Anything that he might once have kept here that he now wished to forget had thankfully been taken to the warehouse and destroyed in the fire there. There was very little for him to do before he would be ready to leave Bögenhafen once and for all.

But before he went anywhere there was one last, vital obligation Dieter had to fulfil; one that he had sworn on his sister’s soul that he would carry out in her memory, in penance for all that he had done that he was now so ashamed of.

Sitting down at his desk, he took a clean piece of parchment from his scrip, along with his writing tools. Dipping his quill into the ink-well Dieter began to compose a letter, taking care to make sure that he got all of the details right, in the correct chronological order, but taking pains not to reveal his own identity as the writer.

His report finished, the paper folded and sealed, Dieter went out into the street and hailed an urchin who was tossing stones into the gutter. For a farthing the boy agreed to deliver the letter, running off down the street laughing excitedly.

Going back to his room, Dieter hauled his trunk from under his unmade bed. Those items which hadn’t been lost to the fire—a few clothes and little else—he quickly packed into the small chest that he had brought to Bögenhafen with him when he had first arrived at the beginning of the year, in Nachexen. He slung his battered scrip over his shoulder, quill, paper and ink safely stowed inside again, and prepared to heft the trunk back down the stairs and across town to the Reisehauschen.

He looked up and an icy chill entered his heart.

Standing in the doorway was Erich Karlsen. Having been in the company of normal people again for the last fortnight, Dieter realised just how unhealthy, unkempt and demented Erich had become. His robe alone looked like it had not been changed in weeks. Madness glinted in his eyes but the expression on his face was one of utter panic.

“Where have you been?” Erich asked sharply.

“I had to go home,” Dieter replied, not telling Erich any more, not wishing to vocalise the horrid truth behind his homecoming as that wound was still raw and it still hurt too open it again.

“B-But this is your home,” Erich said manically.

“Not anymore.”

Erich’s glittering eyes fell on the trunk on Dieter’s bed. “Where are you going? We have work to finish here.”

“Not anymore we don’t.”

“Oh, b-but we do,” Erich insisted, the look of desperation still written boldly across his features.

“What do you mean?” Dieter asked guardedly.

“I-It’s easier if I sh-show you.” The youth was now hopping from foot to foot in nervous anticipation. “Come quickly. I-It’s urgent!”

Dieter took off his scrip and laid it on the bed next to his trunk.

“Very well,” he agreed, “but it cannot take too long. I do not have much time to spare,” he said, thinking of the letter he had just sent.

He owed it to his old roommate to go with him, Dieter decided. It pained him to see Erich like this, and his roommate wouldn’t have been like this if it hadn’t been for his own obsessive quest to discover the identity of the mysterious Doktor Drakus. Dieter would go with him now, quickly, and then when the matter was resolved, whatever it might be, he would collect his luggage and set off on the return journey to Hangenholz.

 

Erich led Dieter out of Dunst Strasse, along the Eisen Bahn for a hundred yards and then down into the maze of back streets in the vicinity of the carpenters’ guild and Langen Strasse. As the pair hurried on their way they talked.

“Erich, where are we going?”

“I c-can’t tell you.”

“Why not? Are we heading for the docks?”

Erich paused before answering. “Y-Yes. Th-that’s right.”

“But I thought you said you couldn’t tell me.”

Logic seemed to have escaped Erich along with his senses.

“I-I c-can’t! B-Because you’ll be h-horrified.”

Dieter’s blood ran cold. What could it be that Erich was so desperate to show him and yet at the same time could not even bring himself to talk about?

Suddenly all of Dieter’s suppressed doubts and worries returned in a pulse racing moment of panic. Erich was pulling away, getting several steps ahead of him, turning into a narrow alleyway between looming neglected tenements, their doors marked with peeling red crosses.

“Erich!” he said, running after his companion and grabbing hold of the apprentice by the shoulders, spinning him round to face him. “Is it to do with Leopold?”

The look of apprehension melted from Erich’s face to be replaced by an even more unnerving smile.

“You could say that.”

Dieter let go of Erich’s shoulders and let his arms drop, taking a few slow steps away from the grinning maniac. As he did so he began to take in more of his surroundings. There was something uncomfortably familiar about the street in which they were now standing. Twisting his head round he took in the street sign secured to the disintegrating facade of a crumbling building and his suspicions were confirmed. He hadn’t been back to this street in over three months. Erich had led him back to Apothekar Allee.

Dieter took another step backwards as a black shape detached itself from a darkened doorway beside Erich. An appalled whimper escaped from Dieter’s open mouth. He thought that he was going to be sick.

Leopold Hanser’s corpse dragged itself a step closer, a low moan escaping its own blistered lips. The corpse was virtually unrecognisable but how could it be that of anyone else? Its flesh was a crisped black and red mess from the burns it had suffered as the warehouse fire consumed it. Its lank blond hair had burnt away completely. But the cadaver’s slack-jawed expression hadn’t changed, and Leopold’s corpse still wasn’t Dieter’s to control.

Dieter turned on his heel to run but then froze again. Advancing towards him with slow yet certain steps were two thugs he had hoped never to see again. The body snatchers—the town’s sexton and his collaborator—were blocking the end of the alleyway. To make matters worse, their shambling gait was that of Leopold’s walking corpse, and skin of their hands and faces had developed a sickly grey-green pallor.

In panic Dieter looked around him past his assailants to see if there was anyone around who could help him.

It was late afternoon; surely there was someone still about their daily business who could see what was going on!

But there was no one else.

Dieter’s eyes focused on the crosses daubed on the doors of the deserted street again and realised that the black pox had not left anyone alive here to witness the end of his life.

He turned back to face Erich and the undead Leopold again, reasoning that he had a greater chance of getting past them than the hulking body snatchers. But then it was too late and they were on him, all of them, rough hands grabbing at his body, their reeking charnel-stink making him gag.

Dieter screwed up his eyes, lest he have to look into the soulless pits of the corpses’ eye-sockets. He retaliated with his own hands, recoiling in revulsion as his fingers sank into clay-like flesh.

The shambling undead continued to press in on him, their fists abusing his body as much as their very appearance and death-reek assaulted his overwrought sensibilities, his mind strained to breaking point.

Dieter felt a sharp crack as something blunt connected with the back of his skull and he mercifully blacked out, his consciousness swallowed in black oblivion.

 

Awareness returned in a blaze of cranial agony. His body ached from the pummelling he had received at the clubbed fists of the zombies.

Dieter opened bleary eyes, expecting to see the vaulted ceiling of Doktor Drakus’ laboratory vault. Instead he found himself looking at a lower curved ceiling of damp dark stone, adorned with strings of mould and patterned with a faintly luminescent fungus. He could see the glistening nubs of tiny limestone stalactites coming into gloomy focus above him.

He tried to move and immediately felt a sharp pain across his shoulder blades and resistance against his legs. Rope rubbed against his wrists and when he tried to move his feet again he realised that his ankles had also been bound. There was a cold ridge of stone pressing against his spine. He could move his head, although he almost dared not, afraid of what he might see. However his inherent curiosity and sheer desperation won out in the end.

Dieter looked to his left. He was in an underground chamber of some kind, the murk illuminated by the luminescent growth speckling the walls and ceiling, and it didn’t take him long to work out what kind. A series of horizontal alcoves, each the length of a man and only a couple of feet in height, were recessed into the wall on the far side of the chamber. In each of these shadowy niches lay the skeletal remains of a human being. The rotten remnants of shrouds still clung to the bones of some of these revenants. All had been laid out with their bony hands clasped across the hollow cages of their ribs. Dusty spider webs festooned the calcified remains.

He was in a subterranean crypt. He guessed that it was somewhere within the bounds of the town cemetery. It could even have been underneath the Chapel of Morr itself. The small size of such mortuary temples often belied a more extensive complex of morgues, embalming rooms and burial chambers buried under the ground.

Dieter glanced to his right and saw the rectangular shape of a stone sarcophagus between him and the opposite wall. He guessed that he was tied to one like it. Craning his head back he could see the top of an inverted archway and the suggestion of statues either side of it in the darkness. He also thought he could see another sarcophagus tomb behind him.

There was a shuffling sound like the hem of a robe dragging over flagstones. Dieter looked back past his feet, pushing his chin down on his chest so that he could see what lay beyond the end of the tomb to which he had been lashed.

Straining his eyes to peer through the gloom he began to see shapes resolving there too; human figures. One of these solid shadows was moving towards him. Dieter’s heart thumped wildly in his chest. Was this mausoleum destined to become his final resting place too?

There was a sudden flare of light and a lantern glowed into life.

“So, you are awake,” a voice slithered.

The lantern swayed closer and Dieter looked into a face ruined by disease. The shrivelled skin was a mess of boils and weeping pustules, crusted with foul discharge. A tumourous growth covered most of the right eye. Dieter saw again the gaping sore at the side of the Corpse Taker’s mouth, the nose stripped of flesh by the pox.

Dieter gagged at the necromancer’s horrific appearance as much as at the accompanying stench of plague-rot that hung about him like his glyph-adorned robe. Dieter’s head felt heavy and groggy as if he had overindulged at the Cutpurse’s Hands the night before.

“Doktor Drakus!” he gasped, the plague-scarred creature peering over him with cataract-clouded eyes.

“That name will suffice I suppose,” the necromancer said, his voice a sibilant whisper. “It is certainly less conspicuous than that of Corpse Taker.”

Dieter saw now that it was not Drakus who was holding the lantern so as to inspect his prisoner’s body. The necromancer’s manservant stood silently at his shoulder, his cadaverous face white as polished marble in the flickering glow of the light he held.

“W-What do you want with me?” Dieter stammered, overwhelmed by the horror of the situation he now found himself in. He had to know why he had been brought to this place; he had to know why he was going to die.

“Can’t you guess?” the necromancer sneered and Dieter saw the gaping sore at the corner of his mouth split the evil smile even further across his cheek to a pox-eaten ear. “Your body is ripe for the taking. I want everything: your mind, body and soul.”

Dieter swallowed hard and tasted bitter bile in the back of his mouth. Was this how it had been for Anselm Fleischer? Was this what had driven the poor bastard mad?

“Why now? Why this night?” Dieter pressed.

“Because it is auspicious.”

The Corpse Taker pointed with a scabbed claw at what Dieter now saw was a body hanging from the back wall of the crypt.

The body of Father Hulbert, Bögenhafen’s own minister of Morr, had been suspended from manacles secured to iron fastenings hammered into the ceiling. Hulbert’s feet swung a few inches off the ground, just above the pool of the dead priest’s intestines unravelled on the floor beneath him.

Dieter felt his gorge rise again.

“C-can I see?” came a familiar voice from the corner of the crypt. Dieter was reminded of the last time he had heard that voice, when Erich Karlsen had betrayed him to the Corpse Taker.

The gangly student moved into the pool of queasy light, his madly staring eyes reflecting back the flickering lantern in the dark mirror of his pupils.

Dieter felt cold hatred knot his stomach and subconsciously tensed his muscles, straining against his bonds once again.

“I think we are ready to begin,” Drakus told his two accomplices.

“Begin what?” Dieter demanded.

Drakus fixed Dieter with his cataract stare, which was none the less piercing in spite of the clouded lenses. “This will hurt you more than it will hurt me,” the necromancer hissed.

Panic gripped the physician’s apprentice. Dieter pulled on the ropes again, feeling them chafe the skin at his wrists. He had to free himself. He could feel the cords snagging on the rough edges of the sarcophagus. Perhaps he could break them that way. He pulled again. And again. And again.

Drakus and his manservant began to chant, just as they had done beneath the house in Apothekar Allee. Only now they were joined by another in the enactment of their iniquitous rite: Erich Karlsen.

The eerie sound echoed from the algae-stained walls, filling the mausoleum with spine-chilling, supernatural harmonics. It sounded as if ghostly voices were joining in the summoning of the winds of death to this place. And as always there were the half-heard noises of rustling wing cases and scuttling legs.

The words had a familiar flavour for Dieter now. In response to their resonances, images erupted unbidden from the heart of darkness he had buried deep within himself.

He saw all manner of grotesque and grisly manifestations of death. Old Gelda, her tongue cut out, blood dribbling from her mouth, trying to scream as the heavily hooded Kreuzfahrer pushed the burning brand into the headman’s hand. Festering necrotic tissue. Erich’s cat coming to spitting life in the eerie light of the twin moons. Animal skulls picked clean by carrion feeders and bleached yellow by the wind and sun. The last precious bubbles of oxygen escaping from the lungs of a drowning man. Dieter’s own hands closing around Leopold Hanser’s scrawny neck.

He heard the hollow boom of crypt doors slamming shut. The creaking of wind-blown gallows. The tap of bare bone against a headstone. A mother wailing for her stillborn child. Pigs screaming as they met the slaughterman. The death-knell proclaiming Katarina’s death.

He could smell blood, mould, the stink of burning fat. Tasted rancid maggoty meat, the earthy flavour of grave-dirt, the tang of blood, the bitter aftertaste of vomit. Felt the stygian blackness reach for him, enclose him, smother him.

Dieter looked past the images appearing within his mind’s eye, as if in their own violent death-throes, at the necromancer standing over him. A shimmering black light surrounded Drakus like an aura of coruscating darkness. It suffused the air above the sarcophagus and coiled itself into disturbing silhouettes as the sorcerer’s pockmarked hands danced over Dieter’s body.

The air was filled with an insistent buzzing, like the scraping of a saw on the inside of his skull. Liquid darkness ran like blood across the walls.

The dark magic coalescing within the chamber was a tangible presence to Dieter. He could feel its stinging icy tentacles coiling around his arms, his legs, his torso, and even forcing their way inside him. An agonising, brain-splitting pressure was building behind his eyes. It was the same terrible pressure he had felt when he had witnessed Drakus’ evil awakening rite, as thunderous and oppressive as a building storm front. Lightning crackled across the surface of Dieter’s brain.

Drakus reached down and steepled the bony fingers of his right hand onto his prisoner’s sweat-slick forehead. Dieter let out a cry of surprise and pain. There was someone else inside his mind. At first the alien consciousness probed and poked at the surface of his mind, as a physician might investigate an open wound. But an instant later the necromancer pushed his scalpel-sharp will inside Dieter’s skull and took possession of his mind.

Pain such as the young man had never known before flared through every fibre of his being. He arched his back in convulsing agony, the muscles in his body going into spasm. But somehow Dieter knew that this torturous pain was what came as a consequence of great power, and part of him thrilled at that dark realisation.

He had never felt power like it. It was at least ten times what he had felt when he succeeded in raising Leopold Hanser from the dead.

Suddenly he was experiencing another existence in another place, at another time, as well as enduring what was happening to him here and now in the sepulchral darkness of the mausoleum.

Through Drakus’ haunted memories, with the necromancer’s own eyes, Dieter saw how, with perfect irony, a man driven to prolong his own life by whatever means necessary had contracted the plague. He saw the necromancer fleeing from an angry pitchfork-waving mob. He watched—an omniscient observer—as the sorcerer came to Bögenhafen under the pall of night, how he assumed the identity of Doktor Drakus and carried out his foul research so that he might find a way to rid himself of the rapacious, flesh-wasting disease.

Dieter still wondered how he himself had avoided succumbing to the vile black pox himself. Was it because he had been marked by Morr, or had some other malevolent force marked him out as its own?

Amidst the turmoil raging like a cyclone inside his mind, realisation dawned. It was Drakus who had ultimately brought the curse of the plague upon Bögenhafen, the vermin infesting his laboratory-vault carrying the black pox to the wider world beyond the house in Apothekar Allee.

As he continued to share Drakus’ awareness, Dieter saw the necromancer performing the very same ritual he was attempting now, only this time with Anselm Fleischer instead of himself. He saw the misguided fool’s psyche collapse under the pressure, his mind not strong enough to contain Drakus’ undying spirit. He saw the ritual fail. It had cost the necromancer almost as dearly as the sanity-robbed Anselm, bringing Drakus to the verge of death. It had taken him months to recover.

Dieter felt that he himself could slip into inescapable insanity at any moment. It had become a true battle of the wills now as, with the sweat pouring off him, Dieter physically strained to force the necromancer out of his mind.

Now Dieter was back in Doktor Drakus’ cellar, only he was not watching the scene through his own omniscient eyes but through those of the necromancer. He saw his own unconscious form lying on the floor of the crypt. He saw a petrified Erich prostrate himself before the Corpse Taker, begging his mercy, promising to do anything if the necromancer would only spare his life. He heard the necromancer and the apprentice make their unholy bargain—Erich’s life in return for Dieter’s soul—and witnessed them seal the pact with Erich’s blood.

Erich had been Drakus’ pawn ever since, manipulating Dieter in the cruellest way imaginable. Dieter was able to fill in the rest himself: Erich carrying him back to their lodgings in Dunst Strasse, observing his progress after the change Drakus had forced in him, encouraging him to develop his necromantic abilities and strengthen his mind, Dieter’s friend becoming his betrayer, unknown to the impressionable country boy, acting as Drakus’ spy, judging when Dieter had honed his talents enough and become a suitable vessel into which Drakus might transfer his malevolent soul.

It had not been Dieter who had driven Erich mad at all. It had been the older youth’s bond with the Corpse Taker that had caused him to steadily lose his grasp on reality. This bitter insight brought Dieter back to the present with a jolting shock.

He knew that he was going to die. For the briefest of moments he wondered whether he should let Drakus finish him, rather than let the black sorcery he had turned his back on use him again for its own foul purpose. It was nothing less than he deserved.

But then the tiny part of Dieter’s mind that was still his, and that was still rational, realised the awful consequence of such an action. If Drakus succeeded in what he was trying to do—if Dieter simply gave into him—the Corpse Taker would live on in a renewed body and with renewed vigour, able to see the fulfilment of his evil schemes, whatever they might be.

The necromancer had to be confident that his plans would come to fruition on this night, for having been so careful to keep himself hidden for so long, Drakus had taken a great risk by killing the town’s sextons and Father Hulbert. He was obviously not intending to remain in Bögenhafen much longer, not unless he had something even more shockingly atrocious in mind. After all, in the wake of the plague there had been a huge increase in the number of fresh corpses buried within the environs of Bögenhafen: a veritable army. The army Dieter had seen in his dreams, in his nightmares. Dieter had no choice but to fight the necromancer. And besides, he wasn’t ready to let death take him just yet, as it had taken every last member of his family.

Fighting back the pain, Dieter inhaled deeply, feeling talons pressing against his skull, feeling the necromancer’s dark intelligence crushing his psyche, as if Drakus was squeezing his very soul from him. As the mildewed air of the mausoleum filled his lungs, Dieter focused on the horrific unreal sensations overwhelming his senses.

His mother lying cold in her grave. Rats burrowing whiskered noses into the soft parts of his body, elongated incisors biting and tearing. The ring of a whetstone on an executioner’s axe. Blighted crops. The abattoir-stink of the slaughterhouse. The highwaymen butchering the coach driver and his passengers. A platter of furred rotten fruit, turning to black sludge in the fusty heat of summer, thick with flies. The acrid taste of soured milk. Hordes of zombies bearing the marks of the plague, and the faces of the people of Bögenhafen, marching to make war against the living; their leprous bodies blotched with rot and riven with maggots.

With the last shreds of his conscious mind, Dieter distilled the sights, smells and sounds back into the eldritch, ethereal matter out of which they had originally grown, watching them melt and dissolve into an inky morass as he drew the dark power from the essence of death itself congealing within the crypt, focusing them into a single point, into one thought: that he wanted to live.

And that one simple desire took form.

A bolt of dark energy blasted out of Dieter, exploding from him in a catastrophic shockwave of lethal power. It slammed into Drakus and his moribund manservant, hurling them backwards. Erich stumbled and fell to the floor of the crypt, as the chamber shook. There was a sharp crack as he hit his head on the flagstones and was knocked senseless. The echoes of the chanted mantra died, swallowed up by the cloying air.

The unnatural mental connection was broken. Dieter felt numb with cold and yet at the same time every nerve ending in his body was on fire.

The eldritch wind rose to become a screaming gale that tore through the crypt, tugging at the grave-clothes of the skeletons in their niches and swirling the sorcerer’s robes around him as the necromancer got to his feet.

“Such power!” Drakus gasped, tasting Dieter’s aura. “I can see it blazing like black fire in the orbs of your eyes. But it is not enough to stop me!” he roared with malice burning in his own cataract-clouded eyes.

Dieter strained against the ropes holding him. He focused his mind on the bindings, seeing the hemp rotting away over time. The rope dissolved and Dieter rolled off the sarcophagus, landing on his hands and knees on the flagstoned floor. His kneecaps and wrists jarred painfully but it was nothing compared to the agony flaring along every nerve in his body as the dark energy surged through him in an uncontrollable torrent, like a howling gale.

He struggled to his feet, using the sarcophagus for support. He breathed in deeply, gulping in stale air as he felt a twinge in his chest. Had he cracked a rib? Or was it another side-effect of drawing on the esoteric energies of the dead?

Dieter heard a shout, a barked command. Drakus was holding his hands to his shrivelled skull.

Figures that had been standing propped against the walls of the crypt, as motionless as marionettes waiting for the puppet master’s will to give them life, lurched towards Dieter as Drakus’ flesh-puppets jerked into stilted life.

Father Hulbert’s corpse thrashed against the wall where it hung, twisting spastically from the iron manacles, the rope of its intestines slapping wetly against the floor as it spasmed.

The zombies advanced on Dieter with slow yet relentless steps. The two body snatchers, their septic faces spoiled by rot, were closing on him from behind. Their hulking forms blocked his escape route up the steps out of the crypt. And the charred-flesh form of Leopold Hanser was bearing down on him from the other side. The smell of overcooked meat hung heavy about Leopold’s carcass.

Dieter recoiled again before the mindless monster he had created. Looking into that slack-jawed, fire-blistered face was like staring into the face of his own mortality.

To his right were the obstructions of the sarcophagi, to his left the burial alcoves of the ancient dead. He was trapped, and he was going to die. There would be no salvation for him now.

Dieter gazed in horror into the dead eyes of the zombies. It was said that the eyes were the windows to the soul. The zombies’ glassy stares told him that there were no souls left inside the macabre shells of their reanimated bodies.

Oppressive shadows closed in on Dieter once more.

He inhaled again, ignoring the pain in his chest this time, welcoming the approaching dark. And now it seemed to Dieter’s mage-altered sight that rivulets of glistening darkness were running like fluid obsidian across the floor of the crypt to pool at his feet, before being absorbed into his body as he began to shape his own spell.

Drakus’ ritual of awakening, all those months ago, had roused a monster lurking inside him, a sinister latent force that had lain dormant throughout his life until he had reached adulthood and fate had brought him to Bögenhafen. But where had that power come from? Had it been because of his upbringing? Had it been due to veneration of Morr and all things funereal?

From an early age Dieter had been exposed to death in its various forms, archaic funeral rites, and the dwelling places of the dead. He had been left traumatised as a child by his mother’s death. As he entered adulthood he had been drawn to death. He had sought a profession that dealt with death, or at least supposedly its prevention, on a daily basis.

He had tried to deny his heritage; he had tried to become a physician, a healer of the sick, but fate, or nature, had determined that he should become a killer, a dealer in death. From the very beginning, his upbringing and life experiences had prepared him for this moment, had prepared him to take on the mantle of the necromancer. He had fought his inherent dark nature and had lost.

Dieter did not know where the enchantment came from, but it came nonetheless. He could hear the drumming of rib bones on stretched skin. The drumming grew louder until his head throbbed as though the bone-beaters were hammering on his eardrums. He felt the cold wind of Shyish, blowing right through him as if he were no more corporeal than a ghost, drawn to this place of necromancy and death.

And Dieter understood why it was so easy to raise the dead in this place. The power had always been here, residing within the mortuary crypt, a source of great and terrible power waiting be tapped. That was why he had been able to resurrect Leopold in the warehouse. By killing his friend there Dieter had consecrated the place by the act to the forces of death, and encouraged the darkest winds of sorcery to blow there more readily.

Dieter didn’t need his notebooks or hours of preparation, to work his spells in the mausoleum either. Drakus was drawing the power of death from this place and Dieter was able to use it just as well. But there was no doubt as to which was the more powerful will at work here. Dieter could still feel the Corpse Taker’s malignant presence lingering at the edge of his conscious self. There was no time to waste. Dieter had to act fast whilst Drakus was still reeling from the shock of his initial assault.

The dark apprentice cast his spell.

Blood, hot and sticky, gushed from Dieter’s nose as the dark power gathering behind his eyes was released in a second conjuration. The bitter black bile taste filled his mouth and he doubled up, beset by agonising, stabbing gastric pains. But his suffering mattered not: the spell had worked.

Coils of palpable darkness extruded from Dieter’s fingertips—drawn from the hurricane of eldritch power raging within the mausoleum—and wound through the shimmering air into the wall alcoves. The black mist wrapped itself around the bones lying there, shrouding them in a cloak of writhing shadows that pulled the bones together, creating bonds of darkness where in life there had been knotty strings of sinew and ligaments. In a hollow clatter of rattling bones, three skeletons pulled themselves free of their stone shelves, dragging threads of cobwebs with them.

Amidst the pain, Dieter felt a certain grim satisfaction that he had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had raised the dead.

The skeletons moved with jerking insect-like movements towards Drakus’ shambling undead. The zombies, in response, turned on the bone mannequins, groaning hungrily. A fist like a lump hammer smashed into the ribcage of a skeleton, shattering its sternum, as chattering teeth sank into the meat of the sexton’s arm. A hand that was made of nothing but bare bone clawed the face of the other dead gravedigger, tearing open a cheek, so that the zombie’s own champing teeth could be seen. The last of the skeletons leapt on Leopold’s corpse, tearing at the crackling of its blackened hide, its jaws closing around the flesh-puppet’s head.

Dieter’s vision was beginning to grey at its periphery. He felt utterly exhausted. Maintaining the sheer physicality of the skeletons was taking an extreme toll on his body. He could feel the strain in every muscle, every sinew, every nerve flaring with pain. He had nothing more to give.

A spear of dark energy slammed into a skeleton, sending it hurtling across the chamber to shatter against the far wall. The same fate befell a second and then the third was obliterated in an explosion of bone.

Doktor Drakus had recovered and his wrath was terrible indeed. But he wasn’t going to rush his revenge. He was going to savour every moment he spent punishing Dieter for his audacity.

Through a combination of luck, will power and sheer terror Dieter had managed to raise the dead in order to defend himself. Yet he lacked the power, and more importantly the control, that one so well practiced in the Black Arts as Drakus possessed. And the Corpse Taker was showing him who was still the true master here. Now it was time for Dieter to die.

The apprentice was aware of the insistent buzzing again, a sound like rusted metal teeth sawing bone.

The bolt of pure, concentrated malevolence hit him squarely between the eyes and sent him sliding across the floor. Dieter was gripped by a violent seizure, which crippled him as a series of thrashing paroxysms convulsed his body. Foamy saliva spurted from between clenched teeth.

It was as if the veil of mortality had been torn down from before his eyes.

Dieter Heydrich stared in heart-stopping horror into the oblivion of the void. And it recognised him as its own.

 

He was only dimly aware of the clatter of horses’ hooves somewhere outside, the shouts of men and then the sound of booted feet running down the stone steps into the tomb. The shouts grew louder. Drakus spat something in the unholy tongue of the lords of undeath. There was the clash of steel upon stone, the wet thunk of blades meeting flesh and a god-fearing oath.

Dieter opened tear-blurred eyes and looked upon the mortal world of shadows again in time to see Brother-Captain Ernst Krieger confront the Corpse Taker’s undead.

The bastard received my letter then, he thought.

Sigmar alone knew how the templars had tracked Drakus to this place and at this time. Then again, a garden of Morr would be the first place a witch hunter would look for a necromancer.

“In the name of Sigmar, I renounce you!” Krieger bellowed, laying a blow against a re-formed skeleton that was now fighting for the black-hearted necromancer. “I smite your evil in the name of the holy Heldenhammer!”

The skeleton fell, its backbone severed. Krieger’s two lieutenants were grappling with the hulking gravedigger’s zombie and that of Leopold Hanser.

Dieter rolled over onto his side and tried to stand. He was suddenly horribly aware that he had soiled himself.

Shrieking, the necromancer’s manservant ran at the witch hunter captain, hands become talons raised before him. Dieter saw Krieger’s blade, blazing with the holy golden light of Sigmar himself, open the retainer’s body across the middle. A torrent of maggots, grubs and many-legged crawling things cascaded out of the dry husk of a man. The withered leathery remains of the manservant shrank to the ground like a deflating pig’s bladder as beetles, centipedes and mealworms wriggled free of it, escaping into the cracks between the flagstones.

Dieter was now on his knees. The exit from the mausoleum lay before him, unobstructed.

A strong arm clamped down on his shoulder and Dieter looked up to into the furious fear-enlarged eyes of one of Krieger’s burly lieutenants, as the man raised his sword ready to impale Dieter’s corrupted heart on the tip of his sword. The man obviously took him to be one of the necromancer’s servants.

Then, just as abruptly, the witch hunter was hauled from Dieter’s view as a hulking mass of decomposing hunger and fury yanked the witch hunter off his feet and into the shadows with a sharply cut-off cry. Dieter scrambled to his feet and staggered up the stairs out of the tomb, into the cold Kaldezeit night.

He stumbled onto his knees on the gravel path outside the tomb-structure, retching violently. His head span with a nauseous migraine. Lights flashed like miniature lightning strikes before his eyes. The clamour of battle echoed up from the subterranean burial chamber behind him.

Dieter felt utterly drained of all sensation, all emotion. The skin of his face felt drawn and waxy as he wiped the sweat from his brow and cheeks.

He had peered over the edge of existence and gazed into the oblivion of the eternal abyss. It was a vision that would have been enough to drive most men mad in an instant, or kill them on the spot from sheer terror. That was what Dieter realised he feared most now. More than anything else he feared the end of existence. The cruel awareness of that cold, depthless void had chilled him to the marrow, to his very death-touched soul.

There was no afterlife, no well-deserved rest in the realm of Morr. There was nothing more beyond this life, other than an eternity of unbearable torment as one of a billion lost souls howling their insane agony to the all-consuming void, knowing that there was nothing more than this.

It was that knowledge that made Dieter want more than anything else in the world to never have to face death in that way again.

But whatever else had happened that fateful night, Dieter knew that it was only just the beginning: That which does not kill you only serves to make you stronger.

He struggled to his feet once more. He didn’t dare return to his lodgings in the town, not now. The witch hunters would soon realise that he was not amongst the dead in the tomb and that he had given them the slip. They would come looking for him and he knew that Brother-Captain Krieger would not be happy until he had hunted the Daemon’s Apprentice down like a dog and made him pay for his crimes.

With the garden of Morr dwindling into the darkness behind him, and half maddened by fear, Dieter Heydrich fled into the night.

And the night welcomed him, enfolding him in its deathly embrace.