Necromancer (2 page)

“Go on, brother. I will hear your confession.”

“Then I shall begin at the beginning.”

And as the old man spoke, despite the crackling warmth of the
roused fire, Ludwik felt the cold draw in about him like the chill hand of death
itself.

The first time I saw a corpse I was five years old.

Well, I suppose that is not entirely true. There had been Old
Jack, Black Jack, the village’s protector, for a start. But it was the first
time I had seen the dead body of someone who had been close to me. It seems
strange now to think that I was ever close to anybody, but once, I have to
admit, I was. It was my mother. She had died of a fever.

Did her death affect me deeply? Looking back now I believe it
must have done, possibly more than even I realised at first.

My sister Katarina was only three at the time and could
hardly even remember our mother. Our dear mother. But to me her smiling face is
as warm and bright as it ever was when she was alive; even now after so many,
many years.

It was she who bore us, who reared us, who cared for us. She
was the one who fed us when we were hungry, gave us comfort when we were sick or
insecure, cheered us when we were sad. She was the one who loved us.

And she was so much more to us than a mere mother. She was
all the things that a mother should be, certainly. Provider, peacemaker,
nurturer, carer and source of comfort. But she was also so much more. For she
was a balance to our father. She gave us everything our father did not. She
loved us.

Still to this day I do not understand why my father ever
married, let alone why he had children. My memories of my father from before my
mother’s death are of a sinister, distant figure, who might as well have been
Morr himself to a terrified child. But my memories of him from the time after
her death are darker still.

And besides, that was all so long ago now. So many years have
passed.

So why is it that I can remember it as if it were only
yesterday?

The sun rose wan and watery on the winter-chilled morning of
the ninth day of Nachexen. The first lancing spears of burnished sunlight
pierced the smeared glass of the carriage window, rousing the hunched young man
from a state of disturbed semi-sleep.

Dieter Heydrich blearily opened his eyes and peered
myopically out through the mud-spattered pane. Beyond that he didn’t move. The
hood of his travelling cloak was bunched behind his head into a makeshift
pillow, his thick mane of black hair half-hung over his face. His complexion was
as pale as his hair was black. Dark bags of skin had formed under his eyes due
to lack of sleep and a disturbed night’s rest.

They had stopped at Vagenholt for the night, at a coaching
inn there. But one of the other passengers, a rotund, fat-moustached merchant
from Altdorf had urgent business in Bögenhafen—something to do with meeting a
barge travelling downstream from Weissbruck—and had provided the coachman with
a gilt-edged incentive to get there at the same time as the morning’s river
traffic plying its way on the Bögen, heading for the mighty Reik.

Opposite him the merchant who had requested the early start
was still snoring into his moustache.

Not that Dieter minded arriving earlier than expected. He had
been looking forward to this day for the last thirteen years, he realised now,
almost ever since the untimely and unwelcome death of his mother prior to this
day. The only sadness he had felt on leaving Hangenholz was the emotional wrench
of leaving his beloved sister Katarina behind. He had asked her to come with
him, pleaded even, but she had been adamant, her place was with their father.
She would remain with the black-hearted old priest and keep house for him, as
she had done for all of them from the age of seven. And he would miss her, he
knew, almost unbearably so.

Dieter hadn’t spoken to any of his travelling companions; he
hadn’t seen the point. He wasn’t going to see any of them again. And besides, he
didn’t find it easy to make idle conversation with strangers. As soon as he had
boarded the carriage at Karltenschloss, having made himself as comfortable as
possible, all things considered, he had directed his gaze out of the carriage
window, watching the wilderness of the Empire pass them by.

Not that it had stopped others trying to make conversation
with him. A moneyed widow, in particular, all black gown, ridiculous overly
ostentatious frills, podgy fingers and more than her fair share of chins. Dieter
had given only curt responses to her incessant, probing personal questions and
in the end had stooped to feigning sleep to escape the virtual monologue the
dowager had sustained since leaving Karltenschloss. She had an opinion on
everything, as had her late husband it seemed, from the price of Bretonnian
wines—for which she had an obvious liking—to how the Empire should be run.

The red-nosed merchant had made polite conversation with her
at first, every once in a while throwing conspiratorial, if not particularly
subtle winks and smirks in the direction of his conspicuously disinterested
travelling companion. The merchant had taken great pains to introduce the young
man to everyone on board—as well as every innkeeper they had done business
with on the three-day journey—as his nephew.

Dieter judged the young man to be of a similar age to
himself, but that was where their similarity ended. The youth was a fop, dolled
up like a mummer, in Dieter’s opinion, in silks and other expensive fripperies.
Strategically placed beauty spots might be all the rage amongst the members of
the ostentatious Imperial court, but to Dieter’s mind they looked out of place
in the outlying market towns and country provinces of the Empire.

His appearance was certainly a stark contrast to Dieter’s
plain cloak and well-worn and practical, rather than fashionable, jerkin,
breeches and money belt. The merchant’s snooty companion was fair where Dieter
was dark, his build cadaverously thin where Dieter, although slight, was toned.
Jewellery adorned his fingers, wrists and ears, whilst Dieter wore none. The
fop’s gaze was condescending and sarcastic where Dieter’s was brooding, guarded
and tight-lipped. And he had nothing in common with the effete merchant or
wittering dowager either.

As they had drowsily boarded the carriage again at Vagenholt,
as the village bell was ringing four of the clock that morning, none of the four
temporary travelling companions had been particularly ebullient, not even the
dowager. The fop had picked at his nails in silence whilst the merchant had been
the first to doze off to sleep again.

Even though he was excited to finally arrive at the town
where he would make his name, on being roused by a grubby-faced urchin—the
keeper’s son—Dieter had sleepily struggled into his clothes, musty from days
of travel, feeling the first biting chill of morning in the fire-bereft spartan
room. He then gathered up his scrip and dragged himself downstairs and onto the
coach.

The single trunk that comprised the rest of his luggage was
still strapped to the top of the carriage, along with the possessions of his
fellow travelling companions. In fact it barely seemed that there was any room
for his one piece of luggage when he saw how much the dowager was transporting
with her and the skeins of cloth the merchant had insisted on bringing with him,
along with the strongbox, replete with three heavy locks that he kept with him,
beneath his seat, at all times.

All the luggage certainly didn’t seem to leave much room for
the driver, the Four Seasons’ pistolier watchman and the merchant’s personally
hired bodyguard—a brawny man with a polished dome of a head, sporting a brutal
scar that bisected his right cheek and continued on, down the line of his neck,
beneath the collar of his battered hauberk. The strong-arm’s broken-toothed
grimace and ugly broken nose was enough to deter most opportunist robbers,
Dieter thought, but just in case they didn’t persuade everybody, his
brutal-looking battleaxe and shoulder-slung crossbow probably would. If any
thieves persisted in the face of all of those warning signs, then they deserved
whatever they got for their pains.

Dieter had thought that the two employees of the Four Seasons
Company looked by far the worse for wear, but the merchant’s incentive was more
than enough to shake their hangovers from them long enough for them to get the
coach back on the road.

As the carriage jolted on its way, Dieter’s thoughts were
drawn back to the home, the village and the people he had left behind. His
sister, his father.

The last thing his father had done for him, before he had
left Hangenholz, was to open his personal coffer and give Dieter the money for
the coach fare to Bögenhafen.

There had been no words of well-wishing or any suggestion
that Dieter might be missed. It was as if he was glad to be rid of his son. Now
eighteen, and a man, it was time he made a name for himself in the world beyond
Hangenholz, if that was what he was determined to do. It was as if Albrecht
Heydrich did not understand what Dieter was trying to do with his life, that he
wanted to make a difference.

It was only Katarina who had shown any emotion at her
brother’s departure, the tears falling freely from the limpid deep brown pools
of her eyes. The memory of the sadness he had seen in those eyes Dieter knew
would haunt him for a long time to come, particularly in the dark watches of the
night and the lonely times that undoubtedly awaited him in the days, weeks and
months of study ahead.

Then she had pulled herself together again and wished him
every blessing and told him how proud she was at what he was doing. And then the
sadness in her eyes had been tempered by the familial love he felt for her, and
from her, and an ember of pride flared into glowing life.

The memory of her warm words expressing pride and love would
temper those dark times and bring some warmth into his heart, no matter what the
trials and tribulations of the forthcoming years of study would put in his way.

The persistent snores of the merchant, the irritated sighs of
his younger travelling companion and the dowager’s heavy breathing whistling
through her yellow-stained teeth, Dieter watched the world go by, feeling the
anticipation and excitement rising within him with every bump of the carriage,
his breathing frosting on the cold glass of the window.

He was almost there, at Bögenhafen, at last. He was on the
verge of beginning to fulfil a life-long dream, a desire he had harboured for
the last ten years, when, at the age of eight, three years after his mother’s
death, he was at last able to express what he had wanted to do since the day he
was told that the brain-fever had taken his mother from him, and the life and
love he had known, were taken with her.

Within a matter of hours now—if that—Dieter Heydrich
would be admitted to the grand guild of physicians of Bögenhafen.

The old year had been and gone and now, with the buoyant new
year celebrations of Hexenstag, and the eerie witching night of Hexensnacht
eight days past, the first signs that spring was on its way were already upon
the land, showing themselves on the trees, in the undergrowth, even in the scent
of the air. New life would soon come to the Empire, following the dead months of
winter, just as new life had come to the Empire twenty-two years before, when
Magnus the Pious and the armies of the Empire had met and defeated the Great
Enemy at the gates of Kislev and the Great Incursion by the North had been
halted.

A subtle mist was rising from the swathes of meadow beyond
the trees lining the road, the warming golden rays of the sun’s first light
lifting the night’s dew from the ground. The first fresh green growth of spring
almost seemed visible on the elms and alder, the still-lifeless fingers of the
trees’ branches clawing at the grey sky and forming a canopy over the road.

In only a matter of days Dieter would begin training that
would set him on the path to become one of the greatest healers the Empire had
ever known.

And then, there between the trees, on the other side of the
mist-shrouded meadows, he saw it, the grandeur that was Bögenhafen.

Dieter gave an audible gasp and felt his scalp tighten, his
skin turning to gooseflesh. He had never seen anything like it. Dark stone walls
rose up to crenellated battlements thirty feet high, containing the riot of even
taller, steeply sloping-roofed town houses, tenements, mysterious towers and
temple spires. The town had stood for hundreds of years and from first
impressions Dieter thought it looked like it would stand for centuries more.

Port, market town or seat of learning; it was all these
things and more to the overwrought Dieter. To him Bögenhafen embodied hope,
deliverance from the peculiarities of his childhood, a future. It offered a life
away from Hangenholz and the spectre of his father’s disappointment,
dispassionate disinterest and deathly influence.

Dieter was fully awake now, exhilarated at the prospect of
reaching Bögenhafen and commencing a new, more optimistic, chapter in his life.

It was claimed that town was the third largest in all the
Reikland with a huge population at around the five thousand mark, and that did
not include the passing travellers, bargemen, merchants, guard contingents,
peddlers, pilgrims, livestock farmers and dispossessed, vagabonds, beggars and
travelling actors, troubadours and other entertainers.

This wooded stretch of highway ran parallel to the imposing
eastern wall of the town that looked like it could hold an army at bay for
weeks, if not months. Fortunately for the people of Bögenhafen, during the Great
Incursion of the Imperial year 2302, the invading armies of the north failed to
reach as far south as the Reikland, although there was a rise in the activities
of proscribed cults at the time and herds of beastmen ran amok throughout the
forests, terrorizing the roads through for the best part of the year. Roadwarden
patrols had been doubled at the time and templar purges of their forest
strongholds were increased to deal with the growing menace.