Tales of the Old World (19 page)

Heidel was also struck by the stench that emanated from the corpse, flies
buzzed and disappeared into the cracks between the plates. He shuddered,
imagining what was beneath the armour. The flies preferred what was hidden
beneath the plates to the bloody mass that had been the warrior’s head.

“A pendant, spectacular. It was around the neck of this—” Heidel began, then
stopped. There was nothing: the pendant was not there. He looked up at the
noble.

“Gone?” Mendelsohn raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Heidel nodded and turned slowly.

“Sassen.”

It took them half a day to find trace of Sassen’s flight. They rode two in
line, Heidel sat behind Mendelsohn, clinging as lightly to the man’s back as he
could. At twilight they came across Sassen’s roan, dead by the side of the path.

“He took my grey mare,” Heidel said impassively.

“Aye, and this poor beast looks a little grey itself.” Mendelsohn smiled
brilliantly.

Heidel could not understand this incessant cheerfulness. “Immanuel, how in
this world of darkness, do you remain so—”

“Happy?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not happiness, it’s…” One of his slender hands described a little
circle as he thought of the right word. “It’s a sense of humour.” Heidel thought
about that for a moment.

“A sense of humour is one of the ways to fight the darkness, Frantz. If the
world is a duality, caught between light and dark, day and night, good and evil,
then we understand humour as the opposite of… Damn, I can’t think what it’s an
opposite of right now but…” Mendelsohn threw his arms in the air. “It’s a good
opposite anyway.” He laughed to himself.

“Immanuel?” Heidel said seriously.

“Yes.”

“You’re a very strange man.”

They rested for a while as the sun went down, ate some dried fruit, salted
pork and bread, and let the horse graze. They had reached the point at which
Heidel and Sassen had broken through the forest and reached the wider path. To
the north lay the thin track along which they had followed the evil band. To the
east the wider path continued, the way Mendelsohn had ridden. Both led to the
Talabec-Bechafen road.

“Did you follow me all the way?” Mendelsohn asked.

“No, we cut through the forest from the north. It looks like Sassen is
returning that way. Perhaps he thinks it will be quicker.”

“Well, if we follow the wretch directly he will stay much the same distance
ahead of us. If we return to Bechafen on the trail that I took, we will cover
more distance but will be able to ride. It’s a risk, but it means we have a
chance of cutting him off. If however, he reaches Bechafen before us, I fear we
will have lost him.”

For three days they rode and it was like a nightmare broken only when they
stopped to eat or sleep at night. But sleep was hard to find. To his great
irritation, Heidel would doze off only momentarily before being jolted awake. As
he lay half-asleep he felt the constant motion of the horse beneath him, as if
he was still riding. At other times he felt the roots and rocks digging into his
back, every knot and twist. So he spent most of his time in a strange twilight
world of insufferable insomnia.

When sleep finally took him, he dreamed strange dreams: of riding the same
horse as a cloaked figure. He was too afraid to talk to the man, for he knew
that something was not quite right. Once, in the dream, he touched the figure on
the shoulder, and the man turned. The face was for a moment caught in the
shadows. But as the wan moonlight touched the face Heidel screamed: for it was a
corpse, cadaverous and rotten, and curling down from its shrivelled scalp was a
cascade of perfect brown ringlets. It had touched its cheeks with rouge, in a
gesture monstrous and sickening, and on its face was a grin of yellow, decaying
teeth.

“Humour,” it said to him, “humour is the opposite of…” And those words echoed
in frightful ways. But no matter how he tried, Heidel could not get off the
horse.

On the fourth day they reached the road, and there they bought fresh horses
from a passing merchant for a thousand crowns. More, thought Heidel, than he had
been offered for this task. They enquired and found that a small, weaselly man,
riding a grey mare, had passed within the hour.

They caught their first distant glimpse of Sassen as he entered Bechafen—the tracker riding slowly towards the town’s great wooden gates.

“My poor mare,” Heidel muttered, noticing the beast’s head drooping with
fatigue.

The sun was going down behind them, the chill in the air starting to bite.
They followed Sassen’s route through the gates, past the two guardsmen who
looked indifferently on all those who entered the town. They trailed Sassen as
inconspicuously as they could, trying to keep groups of people between them.
They were fortunate that there were many on the streets: labourers heading for
their favourite tavern, street vendors packing up their goods for the day,
farmers driving their carts towards the gates and the hamlets surrounding
Bechafen. In any case, Sassen did not check behind him; he did not seem mindful
of pursuit, as far as they could tell.

As the two witch hunters made their way through the busy streets, they kept
as far behind as they could, and at times feared that they had lost the tracker.
But just as they were losing heart, peering desperately into the distance, one
of them would notice Sassen heading away down a side street, or just turning a
corner in the distance. On and on he went, leading them across the centre of the
town, and finally they entered the wealthier quarters, trotting past great rows
of town houses, hidden from the road by high walls.

Sassen entered the grounds of a decrepit and decaying building, its eaves
cracked and splintered, tiles missing from its roof, a garden overgrown with
weeds and grasses. The tracker tied the exhausted horse to a dying tree and
disappeared around the side of the house.

“Do we enter now, or rest and return later, refreshed?” Mendelsohn asked.

Heidel noticed that Mendelsohn’s handsome face was weary and lined; his
eyelids looked leaden, weighed down.

“We could rest now and return later,” Heidel replied. “If we do we will be
able to deal more easily with whatever evil we find. However I fear to tarry,
for evil left alone can prosper and grow.” He paused wearily and squinted. “I
say we enter now, and administer the cure for whatever corruption we may find.”

Mendelsohn nodded his head emphatically. “Let us finish this business. Later
we may rest.”

They tied their horses to the front gate and walked into the front garden of
the house. Mendelsohn loaded his pistols while Heidel looked around, sword
drawn.

“There must be a back way in,” Heidel whispered.

They crept around the building, daring a peek through the side windows. The
place seemed empty; no furniture cluttered the rooms, no fire warmed the air.

The back door, peeling paint clinging to its wooden panes, swung loosely on
its hinges. Beyond they could see an empty corridor leading into a shadowy room.
As they entered, it occurred to Heidel that the place seemed even more decaying
from the inside. The floors were covered with grime and dust, and thick, matted
cobwebs hung low from the ceiling. For a moment he felt that he had entered
something dead, as if he stood in the dry entrails of something that had once
moved and lived. Colour had once adorned these walls; people had once laughed in
these rooms and hallways.

They searched the ground floor, and found nothing. Upwards they ventured, but
all the rooms were empty.

“It seems we must enter the cellar,” Mendelsohn ventured. “Though the
prospect displeases me.”

The stairs led down into the deepest darkness. Into the very bowels of this
dead creature, thought Heidel. He pushed the idea from his mind, for it unnerved
him. He was not usually quite so morbid.

Eventually they reached the floor of a dry and empty room. A burning torch
hung on the wall facing them, holding back the darkness. Heidel strode across
and took it. To his left a narrow tunnel, chiselled through the rock, descended
into yet deeper darkness.

“I do not like this, Immanuel,” Heidel whispered.

“Me neither. Yet I fear the solution to which we seek lies deeper down this
tunnel. We are left with but one option. Light the way for me.” Mendelsohn
walked through the tunnel opening.

Heidel followed, holding torch in one hand, blade in the other. To himself he
began to pray: “Ulric, watch over me. Sigmar, guide me.”

The tunnel descended slowly for a hundred paces or so, then levelled out. The
floors were smooth as if worn by years of use, but the narrow walls and the roof
overhead were craggy. Many times Heidel or Mendelsohn clipped outcrops of rock
with their shoulders, arms or knees. The air down here was feud and foul.
Moisture, cold and clammy, clung to the walls and dripped down from the roof,
while small puddles splashed underfoot. The two witch hunters could not see very
far ahead of or behind them, and the unseen weight of the earth overhead
enclosed them. Heidel was in gloomy spirits and Mendelsohn said nothing. Though
remaining level, the tunnel wound now left, now right, and before long Heidel
had lost all sense of the direction in which they moved. With every step the
sense of utter foreboding grew in him.

The stale odour of the still air seemed to increase with each step. With
nowhere to go, no fresh air cleansing the tunnel, the smell accumulated into a
gagging, noxious, stench that began to sicken Heidel. It brought to mind worms
wriggling in dead meat—warming slowly in the sun. Nausea washed over the witch
hunter in waves until finally he could bear it no longer and exploded into a fit
of coughing.

The noise echoed weirdly down the tunnel. Mendelsohn jumped at the sudden
break in the silence and turned. For a confused moment, Heidel’s fears leapt
from his unconscious: as Mendelsohn had turned, he had imagined his face to be
emaciated and cadaverous, a rotting skull, just like the face in his dreams. He
gasped and his heart leapt in his chest. But as soon as he had started, he
realised that it was no so. Mendelsohn was just himself.

“What will the ladies of the court think of me now?” Mendelsohn smiled his
handsome smile, trying to brush the smell from him with fluttering shakes of his
hands. “I shall have to buy myself some expensive Bretonnian perfume to rid
myself of this foetid odour.”

Heidel could not help himself and broke into a shy smile. He did not mention
his nightmarish vision, however, and Mendelsohn’s words did little to allay
Heidel’s fears. The pair began walking again and after twenty paces or so the
dread had returned. All was the same as before: the stench, the darkness, the
water, the loss of a sense of direction. Then just when Heidel felt like
suggesting they turn back, a dim light beckoned before them.

Heidel and Mendelsohn crept forwards until they could peak into the chamber
beyond. It was a cavern, smooth walled and dry, perhaps two hundred feet long
and just as wide. The towering roof disappeared into the darkness above. It must
have been a mausoleum of some sort, or perhaps a part of the Bechafen catacombs.
Desiccated corpses lay on great stone slabs; bones littered the floor, jutting
up at odd angles, in a veritable sea of human remains. Hundreds of narrow holes
were cut into the walls, from which more bones protruded. From everything rose
the stench of death and decay.

In the middle of the room stood a stone contraption, somewhat like an arch,
maybe ten feet high, beneath which stood Sassen. The little man looked up
towards the top of the archway, stepped back, turned on his heels and walked out
of Heidel’s sight. To the witch hunter, the tracker had never seemed so like a
weasel, with his pointy, pinched little face, his furry little beard, his beady
eyes squinting.

From somewhere out of sight, a familiar voice rose to break the deathly
stillness, and echoed down the tunnel. “Come in, Heidel, I’ve been expecting
you. And bring your friend.” It finished with a burst of uncontrollable
laughter.

All hope of surprise was gone, if they ever had it, and Heidel felt bitter
defeat. Wearily he and Mendelsohn stumbled through into the shadowy mausoleum,
arms limply hanging by their sides.

“You’ve come to witness my triumph, of course. Welcome, Herr Heidel, to the
Bechafen catacombs.” Baron von Kleist stepped into the flickering torchlight
towards the arch. A few paces behind him, Sassen loitered more shyly. Swathed in
a black robe, the baron appeared tall and thin to Heidel, much like a cadaver
himself. The torches that lit the mausoleum threw great shadows over his body.
His skin seemed to be pulled too tightly over his head, and his eyes and mouth
seemed to disappear into gaping blackness. His face seemed transformed into a
skull. The baron laughed again.

“Witness my work: from here Bechafen shall fall! Here I shall open the
doorway between life and death. I will conquer death, vanquish nature, and these
pitiful bones will rise once more!” The baron turned slowly around in a circle
and raised his arms up in triumph. He was looking at all the bones and corpses
as if they were all the riches of the world; as if, instead of lifeless, rotting
bodies, they were gems inlaid with silver and gold.

Heidel’s face twisted in fury. “This is blasphemy, infernal sorcerer! And for
that you will pay! Sigmar damn you!”

“Why such harsh words, witch hunter? In condemning me you are only damning
yourself. It was you, after all, who was responsible for the return of the key
to that doorway between.” The baron dangled the pendant before him, taunting the
witch hunter. “My so-called ‘guards’ ran away with it. So I turned to an
employee of an entirely different kind. I thank you for its safe return.”

Von Kleist gave a mocking half-bow. Behind the baron, Sassen gave a strange
little high pitched laugh. Heidel gripped the hilt of his sword in anger. He
yearned to swoop upon the little man and repay him for his betrayal. Heidel
could feel Mendelsohn tense and tremble in fury beside him.