Tales of the Old World (114 page)

The victor of the battle rode through the forest toward Kurtbad, searching
for something.

Otto the butcher slept well that night, despite a nagging feeling of guilt.
He was used to that.

Kurtbad nestled on the edge of the Reiksbanks Forest in central Averland,
four days’ ride from Nuln. It sat beside an old trading route which led from
that great city of commerce and industry to a dwarf outpost at Hammergrim Pass
in the Black Mountains. There, for centuries, the dwarfs had sucked lead and
iron from the guts of the fat mountains. The orc was loaded onto oxen carts and
passed through Kurtbad on its way to the markets at Nuln, and thence by river to
whatever Empire foundry was prepared to pay the best price: gold for steel.
Kurtbad had seen some business in those days.

The greed of the dwarfs eventually exceeded their skill and the bounty of the
Black Mountains and the orc dried up like a staunched wound. Hammergrim Pass was
abandoned and the dwarfs returned to fight the Goblin Wars or whatever dwarfs
do. Kurtbad became a ghost town overnight. The inn was closed and its keeper,
who was a businessman, left for Nuln with a girl from Kurtbad he had married.
She later returned to the village with a young child, no money and a brand on
her arm. The inn was knocked down. Perhaps it was anger or perhaps the people of
Kurtbad needed the wood for their sheep pens, living in wolf country as they
did.

Nevertheless, in the space of a generation, the village had purged itself of
the influence of the dwarfs and merchants, and grass had grown on the road to
Hammergrim Pass.

Into this small village, a single black stitch on the great embroidered map
which hangs in the commerce hall of the Merchant’s Guild in the city of Nuln,
came a black horse with hooves of silver. On its back was a tall man clad in
dark cloth. He wore a hat the colour of coal, with a plume which must have been
dyed because no one knew of any bird with feathers like that. He wore a sword
and a knife, in the manner of a gentleman, and his boots were of soft leather,
also stained the colour of moonless night. His arms were scarred and scratched,
from old battles and new, and he grasped the reins with his left hand as if the
right was unequal to the task.

He sat on his horse for some time, surveying the village and its people as
they stirred in the dawn grey. He sat there long enough for Wilhelm, chastened
for being asleep on duty at the barn, to ring the huge bronze bell. This bell
was the last remnant of the dwarf mining days, except for the occasional
brightly painted rail which kept the sheep in. It had originally been used to
warn the wagons as they left the mountain trail that the road was too muddy for
reliable passage and they should wait for a drier day. Now the bell, which bore
the crossed hammer and axe stamp of the miners, was struck with a mallet to
summon the villagers to the common, the steam mechanism long since decayed.

I am a snake. I am a worm. There is poison in my blood. I can
never die a peaceful death. I am burning now as I will burn then.

Gunter heard the bell as he stared for the fifth time at the place where
Gregor’s body had been found. There were signs to read here, he knew that,
answers written in the ground as clear as any illuminated manuscript.

Just as he couldn’t read the scratchings in ink which adorned the pages of
his father’s books, so he couldn’t comprehend the signs in the mud which had
hardened and cracked since Gregor’s violent death two days ago. He had found the
pieces of clay from the shattered bottle, but they only served to confuse things
further. The only marks he could read reliably were his own deep boot prints,
four sets.

He turned away and straightened himself as he made his way to face whatever
disaster had befallen Kurtbad now.

Anja looked out between the curtains of Gunter’s cottage. The man sat
silently on his horse like a sculpture cast in black leather. She thought he
didn’t look well. He had the balance of a drunkard, and as she watched he shut
his eyes and swayed like a young tree in a breeze. Anja pulled on the shoes
which Gunter had bought for her on one of his trips to Nuln and unbolted the
door.

She was the first of the villagers to approach the man and she straightened
her hair as she walked carefully towards him. He made no sign of having seen
her, so she moved around to the front of his horse. The big brown eyes of the
stallion regarded her critically but the man’s head remained slumped. There was
a stain of dried blood, Anja knew it by its colour, on the man’s right wrist,
above his black leather glove. Anja could see he was alive; his chest rose and
fell slowly.

She summoned up the courage to address him without considering that she
didn’t know how one should properly address a witch hunter.

Gunter drew breath and held the air in until all the goodness had been taken
from it. A witch hunter. Just what we don’t need.

He sized the man up. Anja had helped the man from his horse, which was now
grazing contentedly on the lush grass of the Kurtbad common, before Gunter had
banished her inside. Foolish girl. These witch hunters had no purpose but the
discovery and destruction of Chaos, he knew that, and although there was a
dangerous killer on the loose, perhaps even a monster of some kind, the man in
black might be just as dangerous. Didn’t she know that? Of course she did.

Even now she watched proceedings from the window and heated water on the
stove for the man. Anything to make contact with the world outside Kurtbad, that
was what Anja wanted. Why can she not be content with me? Gunter knew that it
was likely only his training and foreign postings with the Empire army had
brought Anja to his home in the first place, and that was a fragile bargain he
was determined to protect.

He turned his attention to the witch hunter. The man sat slumped against the
wall of his house like a wilted flower, except that he knew no blooms that were
the colour of Death. Gunter addressed him formally, welcoming him to Kurtbad and
asking his business.

When the man spoke it was in a voice which sounded like it was squeezed
through a throat too small to let the words pass, and he shut his eyes in pain.
His name was Dagmar, he was indeed a witch hunter, and he knew about the
troubles in Kurtbad. Gunter had no choice but to offer him the hospitality of
his cottage.

Dagmar lay in the strange bed and contemplated the rafters. They were oaken
and old. Like strong ribs which held the thatched skin of the roof from
collapsing, they met at a huge beam, a great rounded trunk which still bore bark
in some places. A crossbow hung from one end of it, he noticed, well oiled and
maintained. The other held cooking pots and bundles of roots and spices.

Dagmar shifted in the bed and turned his head to watch the girl who stirred
the pot. A whip-crack of pain shot through his ribs when he turned his body to
the side, so he contented himself with the briefest of glances and returned to
looking at the thatching. Grey sunlight filtered between the straw; it lay
across him like gashes.

He had allowed the girl to remove his boots but otherwise he was clad as he
had been when he arrived, in ill-fitting witch hunter’s clothes. The fight in
the forest last night had almost been his last and only the overconfidence of
his opponent had saved him. Dagmar waited patiently for the girl to return with
the stew she was making and wondered if his luck might be changing.

Anja had to feed the man as he couldn’t easily sit up. Gunter had not told
her his name, saying that he thought it was better if she didn’t know such
things. He had gone now, to attend to the horse or get wood or something.

She fed the man patiently, noting that he was most polite. He told her his
name in an attempt to learn hers. She learnt that he was called Dagmar and
freely named herself. What was the danger in that? From what she knew of witch
hunters, they were good folk who hunted monsters throughout the Empire. She had
never seen one but Gunter had occasionally mentioned them in one of his many
travel stories. If he had come here to catch Gregor’s murderer then wasn’t that
a good thing?

She looked at the man’s mud-spattered and blood-stained clothes. Normally she
would have undressed him and washed his clothes for him. He was clearly wounded
beneath the expensive garb. Gunter had not protested when the man had climbed
into his bed fully clothed but Anja had seen his face. She did not want to anger
him further. Not now.

I am evil and it is consuming me. There is no place in me but
hate. There is no place in me but disease. Do not touch me.

Gunter cut wood as if each log was the head of an enemy. He saw many faces
beneath the wedge as he drove it deeply into the chopping block—goblins,
Bretonnians, men who he had slain or almost slain. Most of all, he saw what he
imagined was the face of the monster who must have killed Gregor: scaled, with
tusks and fangs. The creature’s head split with a satisfying snap but there was
nothing inside. He lifted his axe for the coup de grace but the face he saw
became that of his guest and he held the stroke.

Angry with himself for unworthy and inhospitable thoughts, Gunter reasoned,
as he gathered the wood, that the witch hunter had done nothing to earn his
enmity. Perhaps he could bring resources to bear on the problem that would
enable them to catch the killer. He determined to consult with this Dagmar,
after they had all eaten, and returned to the house in a better mood.

What he saw as he came through the low door destroyed his good nature as
surely as if a daemon-wizard had banished it to another realm.

Anja mopped Dagmar’s brow with one of Gunter’s kerchiefs and sat by him as he
dozed. When Gunter returned with the wood she was cleaning the cut on the man’s
right arm. The wound was not very deep but had bled a great deal and had ragged
edges like a newly ploughed track. She tried to take off his leather glove but
he clenched his fist; the pain was obviously too great.

She bathed his arm and wrist but did not ask to take off the glove again.
There was clearly something wrong with the arm, which had a bulge in it where
hers did not. He had talked of a fight in the forest. Perhaps he had broken a
bone then. When Gunter suggested she should return to her mother while the
stranger stayed in his house, she shrugged him off. Gunter might be a great
soldier but he had no idea how to look after a sick man. When he tried to order
her, she responded by reminding him that they had taken no vows and that she
only need take orders from her mother until such a time as they did.

Things became more heated and Anja was forced to stop stitching her sling and
stand up to face him.

Dagmar got out of bed at this point and made excuses about needing to perform
his ablutions.

Anja’s pointed comment about the stranger’s good manners did nothing to
pacify Gunter.

When he returned, she had gone and Gunter sat by the soup pot. Dagmar could
not be sure whether the man or the fire glowed more hotly.

The two men found they could talk easily enough and Dagmar imagined that he
might have more in common with this lonely man than he thought.

For his own part, Gunter was surprised to find himself trusting the engaging
witch hunter, and rethinking what he knew about their kind. This man, Dagmar,
although very knowledgeable about mutant creatures of Chaos, was unlike any
witch hunter he had ever heard of.

Dagmar talked with Gunter for several hours, making various suggestions for
the defence of the village. He suggested, and this is just one example of his
useful ideas, that some mutants have thick, strong necks, and might survive a
hanging. Dagmar proposed the building of a pyre, with a stake set into it, so
that the criminal, when captured, could be burned.

He also said that the mutant was quite possibly living in the village and
promised to hunt the man down. Dagmar asked many keen questions about the habits
of the villagers of Kurtbad, and Gunter told him who was reliable and who
perhaps was not. Then Gunter took a deep breath and told Dagmar his
suspicions.

I am unclean. How can you not smell it on my breath? The rot
of my body, the decay of my heart. We are so much the same, and so different.

Otto Fleischer was a very fat man. He was not a nice man. If the villagers
knew everything there was to know about Otto, instead of just suspecting it,
they would never have let him be their butcher, let alone their undertaker. When
Otto had buried Gregor he had made no secret that he would not grieve for the
man.

Anja thought that the cottage looked like Gunter had been carousing all night
with one of his mercenary friends who occasionally came to Kurtbad, most likely
to hide from the law, and not like the place where a sick man had been
quartered. There were two empty clay bottles next to the fire and Gunter was
snoring loudly. He had obviously slept on the hearthstone and his face was
covered with a thin layer of ash which lifted in tiny clouds with each snore.
The veins on his cheeks were red like a fox and his moustache curled upward on
one side.

Anja looked at this man, her lover, as a farmer might appraise a new-born
lamb, and turned as if to compare his visage with Dagmar’s. The bed was empty.

Anja put the steaming breakfast she had brought onto the scarred table and
walked outside.

Dagmar eased the glove off his right hand and washed both in the stream. The
small stream ran down from the Black Mountains beside the road from Hammergrim
Pass and beneath the stone bridge at the north of the village. The small
graveyard for the people of Kurtbad lay on the top of the opposite bank. The
water was like knives of ice but the hand was mostly numb anyway. He stared at
it in disgust.