Tales of the Old World (108 page)

He could fight the tiredness no longer. Putting his overwhelming exhaustion
down to his long journey and the leeching effect of the continual rain on his
powers, he gave in at last, falling asleep as soon as his head hit the
musty-smelling pillow.

“You’re sure this is going to work?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve taken care of things.”

“But the sacrifice has to be made tonight.”

“I told you, it’s taken care of.”

“So my Gertrude is safe? Truly?”

“She is now. Remember, we owe everything to our protector, just as our
forefathers did in years past. We must make the sacrifice. We all have our part
to play. It is better that one die than the village die. The good of the many is
what matters. The good of the many.”

Grolst took in the furtive group gathered within the dark of the stable, the
smell of mouldering straw and stale horse dung strong in his nostrils. There
were four of them, their hunched forms outlined by the rain-washed moonlight. As
well as the thickset innkeeper, there was the blacksmith and the mournful
looking man from the bar, as well as a bearded, burly forester. Grolst looked
around the darkened stable.

Everyone in the village, of adult age at least, knew the truth about
Viehdorf, but there was something about their dark secret that still made them
feel uncomfortable speaking of it openly.

“What do you mean, you’ve taken care of things?” the broad-shouldered
blacksmith asked, an edge of anger in his voice.

“Have a little faith, won’t you?” the innkeeper said, his slack smile
invisible in the gloom.

“Enough of this goading, Grolst,” the forester rumbled. “Now is not the time
for tomfoolery. I’ve seen the rise in beastman activity in the forests on the
borders of our lands. In fact, I’ve never seen so much in all my born days.
We’re all troubled by it. We need to ensure that our village remains protected.
We cannot miss the sacrifice.”

“And we won’t,” Grolst reassured them with all the guile of a serpent. “He
won’t give us any trouble. I put poppy seed juice in his glass. He won’t have
tasted it under the luska. He’ll sleep now until doomsday. Won’t nothing wake
him before we’re done with him.”

“Then we do this now,” the blacksmith said gruffly.

“We do it now,” the others agreed.

Strangers did have their uses after all, the innkeeper mused as the party
crept out of the stable into the night.

From his hiding place behind the sag-roofed barn, Roadwarden Hoffenbach
looked down on the Slaughtered Calf from up amongst the scraggy trees through
the sheeting rain. There appeared to be four of them shuffling self-consciously
between the half-closed gates of the inn’s stabling yard. Waiting on the dirt
road outside was a heavy-built saddled shire horse, huffing and snorting
irritably in the rain. The men were carrying what, at first, appeared to be an
awkwardly packed sack. The only light illuminating their venture came from the
moon. An arm flopped loosely from amidst the folds of rough cloth, as one of the
men shifted his hold on the bundle, and Hoffenbach realised that what they were
in fact carrying was a body. Unless he was very much mistaken, it was the
bearded, staff-bearing stranger who had been in the bar earlier that same
evening.

Hoffenbach watched and waited, the rain pattering on the brim of his
lobster-tail helm.

One of the party, whom the roadwarden was almost certain was the village
blacksmith, took hold of the shire horse’s reins and put a calming hand on the
beast’s muzzle, as the other conspirators manhandled their captive onto his
back. Was the man dead or merely unconscious? Hoffenbach had no way of knowing.
What did intrigue him was that the conspirators were securing the stranger’s
gnarled staff to the horse’s saddle along with a scabbarded sword, which the
roadwarden supposed must also belong to the comatose man.

If he acted now he could stop them, he considered, but if he did so he knew
that he wouldn’t get to the bottom of what was going on here, and might also
pass up an opportunity to discover what had happened to the witch hunter
Scheitz. Hoffenbach knew the slovenly innkeeper had been lying when he said that
he hadn’t seen the witch hunter, but just how much did he know? From his
involvement in tonight’s proceedings, the roadwarden guessed it was a great
deal.

No, Hoffenbach decided, feeling the reassuring weight of his warhammer as he
hefted it in his hands, he would hold back and see where the Viehdorfers were
taking the red-robed stranger. He had seen his type before too, working as part
of an Imperial commission, as he was. Practitioners of the Arts Magicae.
Spell-casters. Wizards.

As the men led the horse and its burden away from the Slaughtered Calf and
off the road along the winding paths of the forest, the roadwarden followed,
keeping his distance, unseen. Once the party entered the forest, with the eerily
glowing disc of the moon broken by the rain-lashed canopy above them, moved away
from the ambient light of the inn, they opened the shutters of the lantern they
were carrying and the way through the woods was illuminated by a circle of
yellow light.

The ground rose as they travelled south, putting several miles between
themselves and the inn. The going was slow as the blacksmith carefully guided
his horse over jutting stones and swollen root boles that infringed on the
narrow path that they were following. The men were taking care not to slip in
the quagmire that the gradually easing rain had made of the ground.

The further they travelled into the tangled forest the quieter the dark woods
became, the tree trunks more twisted, the undergrowth more thorny and wild, the
path less well defined. Hoffenbach felt uneasy. To him, this was the kind of
place that the foul-brood beastmen would call home.

Then, at the top of a craggy hill, they broke through into a clearing.
Hoffenbach ducked down behind the stump of a lightning-felled beech, and from
his hiding place saw before him something that made the rest of the forest seem
like a pleasant arboreal idyll.

The tree was huge, surely larger than any other tree he had seen in the
forest; its thick trunk twisting upward and splitting into a mass of warped and
misshapen, leafless branches. The top of the tree seemed to point an accusing
finger at the cloud-shrouded night’s sky, as if in defiance of the gods
themselves. Hoffenbach was not able to discern what species the tree must once
have been. Its sheer size suggested an oak to him, but the nature of its rough
bark, grey and granite-like in the light of the moon that was cast down into the
glade between the towering trees, seemed more like that of an ash. Its warped
nature was unlike any creation of nature Hoffenbach knew. Perhaps this tree was
no creation of nature.

It was not just the writhing form of the tree that lent this place such an
all-pervading horror. It was also the bodies, in various states of decay,
hanging from its branches. Some were barely more than lichen-flecked skeletons,
loosely held together by fibrous ligaments; others mere bones, dangling from
moss eaten lengths of hempen rope. Others amongst the tree’s grisly trophies
were fresher corpses, still clad in the clothes or armour they had worn in life,
their flesh grey and greening, heads lolling, eyes plucked clean from their
sockets, mouths fixed in rictus grins of death.

There were the bodies of all manner of people hanging here, the cadavers
swaying in the wind that wound down through the glade to caress the hanging
tree. There were still more rotten strands of rope left trailing forlornly from
the higher branches, their bodies having fallen, now lying amongst the
mouldering leaf litter that covered the putrid soil of this place. Hoffenbach
could see a ribcage here, a shattered skull there.

It was then that he saw, half-buried in the mud and mulch, the red-patina
links of the great chains. Each one was secured to the macabre trunk at one end—looped around its great girth or hooked over iron pegs that had been hammered
deep into the wood—and at the other to one of a number of boulders that were
half-sunken in the earth around the perimeter of the glade. Hoffenbach couldn’t
begin to imagine why.

A gust of wind carried the vile scents of decomposition to him. He could
taste it now on his tongue and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as
his unease increased. The rain that had become a gentle patter on the leaves
above his head finally ceased. The hanging tree didn’t so much seem to grow as
to thrust its way out of the putrid earth. The air of the clearing was heavy
with the smell of leaf-mould, wet clay and putrefaction—the smell of
corruption.

It was only then that he realised that one of the hanging corpses was that of
his erstwhile partner, Schweitz.

The witch hunter’s body swung slowly like a macabre pendulum, his head tilted
to one side at an unnatural angle, his cape torn into tatters, his eye sockets
black, bloody holes. Hoffenbach could see that the tips of several branches were
buried inside the witch hunter’s dead body, as if they had been forced into the
corpse for some reason. It almost looked, in fact, as if they had grown that
way. What ghoulish practices were taking place here? Perhaps the villagers
didn’t just hang their victims.

The only half-sane conclusion Hoffenbach could draw, from what he saw here,
was that the villagers offered the tree sacrifice in the perversely misguided
belief that it somehow protected Viehdorf with its malign influence—the
rotting flesh of the corpses feeding the tree’s hungry roots. Indeed, on his
travels throughout the Emperor’s realm, he had heard half-told tales of such
barbaric practices before.

Still hidden behind the broken stump, Hoffenbach continued to watch, but
still he did not rush to act. If there was anything that his career as a
roadwarden on the highways of His Imperial Majesty had taught him, it was
patience. He would watch and wait for his moment.

The bushy bearded forester, his axe tucked into his belt at his side, took a
noosed rope from a saddlebag and threw half of its coiled length over one of the
lower branches of the ghoulish tree.

Hoffenbach continued to watch as the noose was pushed roughly over the
unconscious prisoner’s head.

Abruptly the man began to stir, shaking his head to clear it of sleep and
clutching clumsily at the blacksmith who was trying to pull the noose tight
around his neck. Then, when he began to understand the mortal danger he was in,
the man started to struggle more violently, arching his back; punching and
kicking at his captors to free himself from their grasp.

Now was Hoffenbach’s moment. Raising his hammer above his head, he charged
into the clearing, leaf mould squelching and brittle bones cracking beneath his
pounding footfalls.

Gerhart’s eyes bulged open as he felt a rope tighten around his neck.
Reacting on instinct, he kicked out as he tried to free himself from the rough
hands he could feel holding him down. He heard a man grunt in pain, felt the
hands let go and then had the wind half-knocked out of him as he fell onto the
wet ground, landing with a jarring smack on his right shoulder. As consciousness
returned to him he became half-aware of men shouting, one as if charging into
battle, others in an angry and confused clamour. The wizard managed to get both
hands on the knot around his neck and strained at it to loosen the noose and
free himself.

Coughing and gasping for breath, he rose onto his knees and pulled the noose
free. Well, that was a first. People had tried to drown him, fry him to a crisp
and shoot him, but no one had ever tried to hang him before.

A combination of wan moonlight and the orange, flickering glow of a lantern
on the ground nearby showed him that he was in a forest clearing. The shadow of
a huge, twisting tree loomed over him, even darker shapes hanging from its
branches. He heard an angry whinny and realised that, as well as men, there was
a horse here. He could smell its animal-sweat stink. There was a man lying on
his back in the mud and leaves not three feet away. That must have been the man
he had kicked.

How dare they? His temper blazed that these impudent peasants would try to do
away with him, a battle wizard of the noble Bright Order of the Colleges of
Magic!

The fire wizard scrambled to his feet. Leaves and thorny twigs clung to the
hem of his muddied robes. The other man was also back-up on his feet and Gerhart
saw that it was the man from the inn whom he had taken to be the village
blacksmith. The blacksmith was slipping on the wet ground lunging for something
the large shire horse was carrying. With a ringing of steel the blacksmith drew
what Gerhart realised was his own sword from the scabbard that had been tied to
the horse’s saddlebag, along with his staff.

With an angry shout, the blacksmith threw himself at the wizard. Gerhart
barely managed to twist out of the way of the enraged man’s charge. The tip of
his sword landed with a wet thunk where, only a moment before, Gerhart’s leg had
been, slicing into the knotty tissue of an exposed root. Out of the corner of
his eye, Gerhart thought that he saw the root retracted at the blow, as a
wounded animal might withdraw its paw from a closing trap.

The blacksmith might be skilled with his hammer and anvil but he was no
swordsman. Evading another uncoordinated swing, Gerhart stumbled over to the
horse and tugged his staff free of the saddlebag. The blacksmith’s next lunge
was parried by the gnarled wood.

The wizard saw that the roadwarden was already trading blows with the
forester, warhammer against axe, whilst the fat, nervous innkeeper was holding
back from the fight.

Then there was the last of the men in the lynch mob—the gaunt, sorrowful
individual Gerhart had seen drinking by himself—running at him, nock-bladed
dagger drawn, wailing like a rabid animal, as if all human reason had left him.