Tales of the Old World (109 page)

The fire mage swung at the desperate man with his staff but his movements
were still clumsy and uncoordinated, even though adrenalin was now rushing
though his veins, purging drugged sleep from his body. He clipped the man’s arm
with the charcoaled end of his staff, but not hard enough to disarm him. The
return blow with the other end, however, cracked the sad-eyed man across the
chin and he dropped to his knees, blood pouring from his mouth.

Gerhart reeled, his head spinning, as the blacksmith came at him again, his
teeth bared in an expression of angry defiance. Gerhart staggered backwards and
collided with the snorting shire horse, which whinnied again and broke away,
cantering towards the edge of the clearing.

The wizard’s sword, still in the blacksmith’s hands, connected with his
staff, the blow sending jarring pain up Gerhart’s arms through his wrists. If
the staff had not been toughened by years of fire-tempering and absorption of
raw magical energy, the blow would probably have splintered it.

Gerhart knew it was unlikely he would be able to hold off the brute strength
of the blacksmith, even if he was an unskilled swordsman. He would need to draw
on the other resources he had at his disposal to bring about an end to this
battle.

He quickly tried to put some distance between himself and the blacksmith as
possible and then closed his eyes on the chaos surrounding him. A spark flared
in the darkness of his mind. Gerhart opened his eyes again but looked now with
his eldritch mage-sight.

The winds of magic whirled and twisted through the clearing, visible to
Gerhart as tormented currents and spinning eddies, bright coruscating ribbons of
power. Black shadow-trails were drawn to the tree. Emerald tongues of flame
slithered across the forest floor. Slanting, aquamarine bars of sorcerous
radiance danced in the sky above the forest, like the fabled Northland aurora.
Then he saw what he had been seeking. Hovering in the air over a forgotten
lantern, left on the ground by one of the lynch mob, a nimbus of red and orange
light, flickering like a candle-flame.

He drew the burnished glow to him, inhaling deeply as he did so, letting the
esoteric energies into every fibre of his being, feeling them warming him to the
core, as if they were healing his injuries, replenishing his strength. Years of
experience fighting upon battlefields across the length and breadth of the
Empire helped him focus now. Inside his mind a flame burned, bright and intense,
growing in strength as Gerhart’s anger fed its ferocity, and a spell took shape
there.

At the edge of his field of vision, Gerhart saw the axe wielding forester
fall as the roadwarden parried the slicing arc described by the axe blade and
brought his own weapon around to connect with the side of his opponent’s head
with skull-cracking force.

Then the spell was ready and the wizard could contain its power no longer.

In an instant the lurching blacksmith was alight, his whole body, clothes and
hair ablaze as if the source of the fire came from inside him. The man faltered
in his run, but then stumbled onward, the fire consuming him, dropping Gerhart’s
sword. A piercing scream rose from the flailing human torch.

Gerhart was aware of other cries of panic.

Seeing what the wizard had done to the boldest of their companions, through
the crackling flames curling from the burning blacksmith, Gerhart saw the
innkeeper now mounted on the shire horse, having somehow managed to haul his
bulk onto its back, kicking his heels into its ribs as the mournful man,
struggled to climb on behind him. He could hear a pathetic whimpering
accompanying their flight. With a whinny, the horse galloped off into the
forest, its hoofs beating a tattoo—like distant thunder on the ground that was
swallowed up by the trees.

The blacksmith took two more clumsy steps and then collapsed, his cries
silenced. The only sound now was the wailing whine, fizz and pop of the intense
fire consuming his body.

Gerhart felt drained. Exhausted, the fire mage slumped to his knees on the
leaf-churned ground. He slowly became aware of the roadwarden’s cautious
approach and looked up through weary eyes at the man standing over him, hammer
still in hand. The black silhouette of the hanging tree rose up behind
Hoffenbach, a sinister, warped perversion of nature, its branches—almost more
like rough-skinned tentacles than tree limbs—clawed at the stratus-crossed
sky. Blood ran from underneath the iron brim of the roadwarden’s helmet.

If it hadn’t been for the roadwarden’s intervention it was quite likely that
Gerhart’s body would have joined those other crow-picked carcasses hanging like
vile death-trophies from the possessive clutches of the tree. Now the warden was
looking at the wizard in shocked surprise—perhaps even horror having witnessed
the spontaneous combustion of the blacksmith. He had risked his own life to save
Gerhart from being sacrificed to the tree. Hoffenbach’s expression mirrored how
his feelings were vying with each other, as he tried to reconcile saving the
sorcerer’s life with the devastating powers he had seen unleashed. Was it wise
to let such a dangerous wizard live?

Gerhart Brennend had seen that expression before. The roadwarden was just as
suspicious of wizards as the next superstitious peasant.

Black tentacle-shadows writhed with unnatural life in the darkness.
Hoffenbach opened his mouth to speak but the only sound that came from his
throat was a gargling death rattle. There was a wet ripping sound and Gerhart
felt a warm, cloying wetness splash his face. His nostrils were suddenly heavy
with the hot smell of iron. Blood. It was only then that the wizard saw the
broken end of a tree-limb protruding from the man’s neck above the top of his
hauberk.

Gerhart watched in horror, transfixed, as other branches seized the
road-warden’s arms, body and legs, wrapping themselves fluidly, disgustingly
around the man with a creaking like a yew bow being pulled taut. Cold
realisation leeched the resolve from him to replace it with a numbing chill as
he barely dared to believe what he was witnessing. Denied its sacrifice, the
hanging tree itself had come to chaotic life. The tree effortlessly lifted the
choking roadwarden into the air and then, in one violent eruption tore the
wretched man limb from limb. Pieces of Hoffenbach dropped to the ground, offal
left dangling from the writhing branches. Then the tree reached for the wizard.

Gerhart recovered himself immediately, the dire urgency of his predicament
filling him with renewed resolve. His sword lay close to the still smouldering
body of his foolish attacker. Reacting almost instinctively, Gerhart rolled away
from the clutching grasp of the branches, stretched out his right arm and
snatched up his soot-smeared blade. The pommel was still warm to the touch.

The tree lashed out at Gerhart again, only this time he was able to fend off
its attack, blocking strikes from its lower branches with his sword. Where his
blade struck the tree, thick dark sap oozed from its wounds like blood.

The branches recoiled from the wizard’s wounding blows, giving Gerhart the
opportunity to get to his feet once more. He backed away out of its reach. It
seemed to the mage that the creaking and groaning of the wood, as it contorted
itself into all manner of writhing shapes, was the tree growling at him.

The hanging tree was not done with him yet. With a clanking of protesting
rusted metal links, the tree uprooted itself, pulled great splayed roots,
dripping earth, from the grave-soil ground of the clearing and began to drag its
massive bulk towards him. The boulders secured to the taut chains also came free
of the orange flecked mud as the tree heaved the great rocks attached to it
across the clearing, gouging great ruts in the putrid loam.

Gerhart had faced all manner of horrors before—slithering Chaos-created
spawn-things, a living daemon-cannon, creatures born of nightmares that by
rights should never have existed in the waking world—but nothing so primal, so
ancient and so terrifying as this hanging tree before. He could feel the malign
influence of the Chaos energies fuelling the tree’s unnatural vigour all around
him. He could feel it thickening the air, feel it raising the hackles on the
back of his neck, chilling his spine, freezing the marrow in his bones, taste
its bitter gall in his mouth. He even felt its cold, corrupting touch in the
dark depths of his very soul.

It was more than that; there was a malign sentience there too, gnawing at the
edges of his own consciousness. Gerhart’s preternatural senses revealed flashes
of visions that were something like memories to him…

He saw blood-daubed, tattooed tribes-men offering the tree sacrifice in the
form of enemies bested in battle… He sensed the powers of dark magic being drawn
to the tree over the centuries as a result of the blood rites practised before
it, and the sacrifices continuing, even as the tribe’s settlement become the
village of Viehdorf… He shared in the memory when the tree, so imbued was it
with warping power, gained some kind of self-awareness… Its influence spreading
through the soil beneath the forest, just like its roots, to encompass the
village, corrupting the minds of the people who dwelt there so that they
continued to feed it human souls, helping to strengthen the tree all the time.
In turn its malignancy kept all other threats to its dominance at bay, in an
unbroken cycle of corruption, sacrifice and soul-feasting…

Gerhart had overheard the exchange that took place between the greasy
innkeeper and the roadwarden back at the inn. Now he understood why the rising
storm of Chaos had left this place untouched. Chaos was already here.

His mind awash with disturbing images, in the dark Gerhart did not see the
root push itself up out of the ground and snag itself around his ankle. Then he
has falling, unable to stop himself. Gerhart plunged down the slope that dropped
away at the edge of the clearing, tumbling head over heels through thorny
thickets; roots and stones bruised his body, brambles snagging his beard.

He slid to a halt in a bed of nettles, cracking his head against a
weatherworn stone. The jolt stunned him for a moment but also helped him shake
himself free of the tree’s malevolent influence. The hanging tree was crashing
towards him, splintering saplings under its weight. Bodies swung wildly from its
upper branches, or were torn from it as they snagged in the crooks of elm and
silver birch.

It was almost on top of him now. A slimy jawbone fell from the skeletal
canopy of the tree into Gerhart’s lap as the chaos tree’s violent lurching shook
it loose from a cadaver swinging high above.

There was no way that he could prevail here armed only with his sword,
Gerhart realised. There was only one thing that could save him now. Gerhart
looked with his mage-sight again and a glimmer of hope entered his heart. The
hollow where he lay was saturated with swirling magical energy. There were
places in the world that attracted the winds of magic more strongly than others,
like iron filings were attracted to a lodestone.

The fire wizard looked down at the stone he had hit with his head. The
tracery of ancient carvings could still just be made out beneath the lichen
crawling over its surface, possibly made by the tribesmen who had first offered
the tree fealty in times long past. The concentration of magical power was
greatest here; drawn to this spot by the ancient stone. Had the primitives who
put the stone here realised what effect its positioning would have, Gerhart
wondered? It was a potential stockpile of power just waiting to be tapped.

The tree reached for Gerhart for the last time, for now there was no escape
for the wizard. As it did so, he breathed out slowly and, ignoring the pain in
the back of his skull, focused his mind once more.

So saturated in eldritch force was this spot that the very essence of the
winds of magic simply poured into the attuned wizard, the tongue of flame
burning inside his mind exploding into a devastating firestorm. Gerhart flung
his arms out towards the tree, his hands seeming to burst into flame as he did
so. Sorcerous power roared from his fingertips, becoming a roiling ball of
liquid fire as it raced towards the hanging tree. Yellow fires blazed within his
eyes as Gerhart cast his spell, immolating the tree with his fiery magic. He had
not felt power like this since Wolfenburg.

Flames washed over the tree, taking hold immediately all over its grotesquely
bulging trunk, fat with the countless souls it had consumed. The tree let out a
cacophonous scream, like the splintering of wood, as if myriad voices were
screaming in unison with the angry roaring of the flames. The tree writhed in
tortured agony as it burned, the rotting corpses hanging from its contorted bow
catching light as well. Skeletal forms crashed to the forest floor in a flurry
of sparks as their ropes burnt through, the raging inferno lighting up the top
of the hill and the forest around it.

His spell cast, his power spent, Gerhart staggered clear of the dying tree.
Out of range of its flailing, fiery death-throes, the wizard watched with grim
satisfaction as the tree burned. As it burned, he fancied that he could see
faces contorted in agony distorting the bark-skin of the tree, adding their
howling voices to the tree’s death-screams.

Satisfied that his work here was done, his staff and sword recovered, Gerhart
left the clearing on the same path the horse had taken with its two riders. The
wizard followed its hoof prints back towards the Slaughtered Calf and the
corrupted village.

The tree itself had shown the wizard that the people of Viehdorf were party
to its evil. The land would not be free of the contagion that was the Chaos
growth’s malignant influence until the corruption that had been allowed to
fester there, thanks to this root of evil, had been exorcised and the wound
cauterised.