Necromancer (29 page)

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.

“And so I left Bögenhafen, never to return.”

His story finished, the old man sank back into the bed.
Silence rushed in to fill the void, left in the wake of the almost hypnotic
sound of his creaking voice, a deafening hush ringing in the confessor’s ears.

For a moment Ludwik was granted a vision of an endless,
aching darkness, which although impenetrable in its blackness, he knew continued
on into infinity. It was a depthless gulf that swallowed up everything that was
drawn into it, an infinite abyss of doom and despair. It was enough to make
Ludwik feel a moment of icy doubt, that perhaps what he had spent his life
believing and preaching had been nothing but a desperate, pitiful lie.

Father Ludwik sat back in his chair again, rubbing his
temples with calloused fingers as if that might somehow help clear the fog of
uncertainty and malefic scepticism from his mind. Only then did he realise that
he had been so gripped by Brother Matteus’ story that he had leaned forward to
listen all the more intently.

Ludwik felt a sudden chill shiver through him that made
frozen muscles spasm and his whole body flinch. He pulled his robe tighter about
him. His feet were numb with cold and the skin of his face felt tight and
pinched. He had been so engrossed in the old man’s confession that he had not
even realised that the fire had died in the hearth.

What time was it, Ludwik wondered, his mind distracted? How
long had the dying priest’s account lasted? The brother must have been talking
for long hours into the night. As well as feeling frozen to the marrow, there
was a gnawing hunger in Ludwik’s belly; or was it the gnawing doubt that gripped
him now? He was still reeling from the revelations of Brother Matteus’
confession—or Dieter Heydrich, or whatever his name was.

Ludwik took a deep breath, trying to order his thoughts and
make sense of what he had heard. Then he let the breath out again in a long
sigh.

“Well, brother, that was quite some story,” was actually all
he could think to say to fill the ringing silence.

“Everything I have told you has been the truth,” Matteus
said, a darker edge to his voice. “Everything.”

Ludwik had to admit that it had been a rather complex and, in
its own way, remarkably coherent story for a madman to concoct and maintain, if
it really had been a fabrication of lies, delusions and half-truths.

“I cannot absolve you of a lifetime of sins such as this;
only Morr can pass judgement on that regard.” If Morr were really there, he
added to himself. “I am sorry to say that, if you are telling me the truth, no
matter how you might have come to tread that path of necromancy, you were damned
from the moment you took the first step.”

“You misunderstand me. I do not seek absolution for my sins,”
Brother Matteus said. There was an unnerving tone of delight in the dying
priest’s voice.

“But you begged me to hear your confession,” Ludwik
protested, anxiety edging his own voice.

“Yes. A fabrication, I’m afraid. I confess
that
was a
lie. But I assure you, everything I have told you since has been the truth
whether you dare admit it to yourself or not makes no difference. It all
happened. The truth has its uses at times, as do lies. I only told you my story
to buy myself a few more precious minutes. I am dying, yes—gunned down at last
by that whoreson witch hunter—but that does not mean that I am as weak as I
might appear.”

Father Ludwik felt a nauseous wave rising within him. The
elderly brother’s voice
was
sounding stronger—much stronger—and had
done for quite some time. There was no way that the rattling-lunged old man who
had started his deathbed confession would have been able to maintain such a
recount for so long. It was almost as if the old man had recovered his strength
with the telling of the tale. And his confessor had been completely drawn in by
it, hypnotised by the wheezing voice.

Father Ludwik suddenly felt colder than he had ever felt
since he had entered the room. What could have caused the temperature in the
room to plummet so dramatically? The fire was already out. The door was still
closed.

It was as if the cold hand of death had taken hold of his
heart and was slowly squeezing every last degree of warmth from his body.

The wind whistling under the door of the cell and down the
chimney could almost be keening ethereal voices. He could almost believe he
could see phantom shapes moving at the periphery of his vision in the shadowed
corners of the room. But when he shifted his gaze to look at them, they
disappeared, only to reappear, half-seen and unfocused, at the extremity of his
vision again.

“I simply had to keep you talking long enough that I might
gather my strength for this body to carry out one final action.”

“Why?” was all Ludwik could manage. “For what purpose?”

“Because I too am one of those sorcerers who pitifully clings
onto life. I know what I am and I cannot change that; I do not want to change
that. I will hold on to what little semblance of life I still possess as tightly
as I held onto Leopold’s neck as I squeezed the life out of him. Because I have
seen what awaits us on the other side of this transient mortal veil.”

Frost drew icy fingers across the windowpane. Ludwik looked
to the bowl of water Brother Oswald had placed on the floor beside the bed. The
surface of the water was becoming misty and opaque as it turned to ice. The
flickering shadows ran together in the encroaching darkness. The lonely
candle-flame fizzled and dimmed.

Horrific images exploded in a brainstorm inside Ludwik’s
mind. Hammering the last nail into the lid of a coffin as the person trapped
inside beat against the other side, their screams muffled by the wood. Severed
limbs. Scalping a cleric of Sigmar as he prayed before a shrine of the
Heldenhammer. The creaking of the gallows scaffold. Administering last rites to
a man drowning in his own fluids as they filled his lungs. Gouged eyes. Another
corpse being cast into a quick-limed mass grave dug from the frozen ground. The
coppery tang of blood in the mouth. Brother Matteus coughing up splatters of
scarlet with his last breath. The insane, wailing voices of all those souls he
had blessed and, in doing so, consigned to the freezing oblivion of the abyss,
thinking that he was sending them on into Morr’s realm of eternal rest. Images
of things which had been, things which might yet be, memories that were not his
to know.

“Come closer, father. I am failing fast.”

Ludwik could not resist. Reeling from the horrifying mental
assault he realised that he was doing exactly as the old man wanted, and he
could not stop himself. There was a stronger mind at work here than his. He was
no more than a puppet being manipulated by the old man’s steel will.

The priest leaned closer. The dying Brother Matteus’ bony
hands grabbed him in a surprisingly strong—frighteningly strong—vice-like
grip, pulling him closer still.

“I perfected Drakus’ technique.”

The evil old man opened his stinking, charnel-breathed mouth,
and Ludwik stared madly, his gaze being drawn into the black pit of his gaping
maw. It was as if the old man’s mouth opened too far, as if his jaw had
dislocated like a snake’s.

The only sound that escaped Ludwik’s own gaping mouth was a
pathetic whimper. In his heightened state of delusional terror, he fancied that
he could see a dark wisp of smoke or mist escape from between the dying man’s
lips, accompanied by a macabre, rasping sound that could only be his death
rattle.

And then it felt like something was in his mouth, pushing
against the back of his throat, forcing him to swallow. There was nothing there,
he was sure of it—how could there be?—but it felt as if something had
slipped down his throat as he swallowed. Something foul tasting and glutinous,
wriggling like a blood-engorged leech.

Then he wasn’t aware of anything anymore, other than the
dark thoughts creeping into his mind. Dark thoughts of a lifetime of evil—several lifetimes, by the measure of mortal men—gnawing away at the edges of
his mind, eating away at his memories and his consciousness like acid. He was
unable to retaliate against such an unexpected attack from an indomitable will
that had existed for far longer than he had, that had held off death for so
long, that had the strength to will the dead from their graves to do his dark
bidding. And in that brief moment Ludwik knew that everything the old man had
told him had been chillingly true.

Brother Matteus’ body fell back onto the bed, the vital
spark of life gone from it at last.

Father Ludwik stretched, flexing the joints in his neck,
hearing the vertebrae crack, and smiled. It was a cold, hard smile. A smile of
unadulterated evil satisfaction.

This new body felt strange, ungainly, but it pulsed with life
and had a good many decades left in it yet. It would serve him well. There was
still so much more to be done to bring his great masterwork to fruition.

But first, he had other matters to attend to; matters of
revenge. Valetin Krieger, whose family line had harassed and hunted him across
the centuries, deserved his own personal attention for shooting him. He would
soon know what it meant to cross a necromancer.

A sinister chuckle escaped his twisted lips.

Father Ludwik turned to leave the room, half thinking that to
maintain this pretence he would need to summon someone to deal with the corpse,
and caught his reflection in a looking glass hanging on the wall by the door.

The predatory smile broadened.

“Yes, I think I shall enjoy wearing this body of yours,”
Dieter Heydrich told Father Ludwik’s reflection.

Then he was gone from the cold cell, where the dying went to
die, and the world was his for the slaughtering once again.

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