[Mathias Thulmann 01] - Witch Hunter Read online

  Thulmann looked over at Gregor. “Thankfully your own was much better,” he said, smiling. The young noble nodded his head in acknowledgement of both the spoken compliment and the unspoken apology.

  Gregor Klausner stared in horror and loathing at the prostrate form of his father’s steward. Anger, the righteous indignation of a man who had sworn to put an end to the horrible crimes committed against the good folk of Klausberg, boiled within him. But the emotion was subdued by the sick horror that drained the colour from Gregor’s skin, that gnawed at the pit of his stomach and his soul.

  Ivar Kohl, a man he had known all his life, a man who had in many ways acted as his father’s surrogate when Wilhelm Klausner had gone away to serve the temple of Sigmar. A stern and unpleasant individual, one who Gregor had feared more than respected as a boy, who he had tolerated more than liked as a man. But to see Kohl unmasked before him as the perpetrator of such heinous acts of heresy and wickedness was a thing beyond belief. Yet the evidence, the unquestionable evidence of his own eyes, was laid out before him.

  The young noble thought once more of the ring hidden in his pocket, that talisman of the Klausner line. The sickness swelled as he desperately tried to tell himself that his fears were impossible. How could his own father be a party to such crimes? Yet why else would his oldest and most trusted servant be lying upon the ground, the witch hunter’s bullet in his leg? How else could a Klausner ring have come to be lying upon the floor of the Brustholz farm?

  “What are you going to do with him?” Gregor pointed down at the figure of Ivar Kohl. The subdued steward glared back at him. Thulmann pulled the wounded man to his feet, ignoring the cries of pain the steward uttered as his weight pressed against the wound.

  “As a duly appointed representative of Sigmar’s Holy Order of Witch Hunters, it is within my authority to question my prisoners in any provincial or municipal structure I deem suits my needs,” the witch hunter told him. “I am sure that Herr Kohl will not object greatly if we escort him home.” The witch hunter looked away, shouting over to Streng. “What about those two?”

  “They’re done for,” Streng replied, casting a sideways look at each of the wounded men squirming upon the ground. “The one you shot won’t last another five minutes. The one I stuck is spilling his belly, might take him a few hours to finish bleeding out.” The mercenary spat at the writhing man. “A load better than the vermin rates,” he snarled, much to the approval of the woman who still held him in a fierce embrace.

  “Well, see that they are both finished and hurry it up,” the witch hunter snarled. “We’re going to take Master Kohl here back to the keep. There will be work for you to do when we get there.”

  Streng’s face split in a bloodthirsty grin.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The witch hunter’s boots clicked across the floor of the keep’s entry hall. He cast an imperious gaze across the dimly lit room, then focused his attention back on the frightened servant who had admitted him and his party. The man kept looking over at the sagging, bleeding figure of Ivar Kohl with an expression that was a mixture of shock, wonder and even a fair degree of satisfaction. The steward was not well loved by his staff.

  “Gregor,” the witch hunter spoke. “Escort Streng and my prisoner down to the cellar you spoke of During their ride back to the keep, Gregor Klausner had related that his great grandfather, a morbid and intensely zealous man who had expired in the act of scourging himself with a steel whip in his later years, had maintained a gruesome reminder of his years as a witch hunter. Beneath the wine cellars, in a sub level, he had built a torture chamber, equipping it with all the vicious implements of his trade. It was an ugly little room, and though it had never been used, it still seemed to echo with the sounds of screams. Thulmann had smiled grimly, commenting, “Sigmar provides.”

  The two men carried their injured captive away. Streng sneered into the semi-conscious heretic’s ear. “Many’s the time you went past that room, I’ll wager,” the mercenary laughed. “Didn’t ever think you’d be visiting it yourself though?” Pushing their near insensible prisoner, the two men disappeared down one of the corridors opening onto the great hall. The shocked servant watched the men leave.

  “You,” Thulmann’s silky voice snapped, causing the servant to spin around. “Take this girl to the kitchens. Get her some food, some decent clothes and a bit of good wine to burn the chill from her bones.” The witch hunter gestured and the servant took the hand of the pale, trembling girl who lingered upon the threshold. Deithild pulled away in fright.

  “It’s alright, child,” Thulmann’s soothing tones told her. “This man will take you somewhere warm and get you something to eat.” He fixed the man with a warning look. “No harm will come to you.” Deithild reluctantly allowed herself to be led away, pausing before Thulmann to return his cloak, which the Templar had thrown about her when they had left the site of Kohl’s abortive ceremony.

  The witch hunter smiled in return, watching the rescued woman be taken away. As soon as she was out of sight, the smile dropped into something unfriendly and filled with anger. Thulmann lifted his gaze toward the stairs.

  It was time for a reckoning.

  Mathias Thulmann glared across the bed chamber, his wrath fixed upon the withered man nestled within the mammoth bed. The witch hunter’s face twitched in barely restrained fury. He pointed a gloved finger at the chambermaid who was fluffing pillows in a corner of the room.

  “Leave us,” he snarled. The tone in his voice caused the girl to set down her work and hurry from the room with only a single, worried glance to her bed-ridden master. “Now,” the witch hunter added in a hiss when she did not move fast enough.

  Thulmann’s anger was matched by that of the aged Wilhelm Klausner. “How dare you?” the old man growled. “I’ll not put up with this nonsense any longer!” He reached his hand for the bell rope beside him, tugging it furiously. Distantly, the jangle of the bell could be heard sounding somewhere within the keep below.

  “You’ll find your steward is otherwise occupied,” Thulmann informed the patriarch. “He is with my man, down in your torture chamber, your lordship.” The scorn in his voice was like the edge of a knife. Wilhelm Klausner flinched away, his already pallid skin losing yet more of its colour.

  “Oh yes, your lordship,” Thulmann pressed, noting the old man’s anxiety. “The fiend that has been preying upon your district has been unmasked at last.” The witch hunter’s hand closed about the hilt of his sword, the knuckles whitening beneath his glove. “By Sigmar, you are more of a monster than any of the vermin you sent to the stake!” he spat. The violence in his words caused Wilhelm to regain much of his composure, the old man rising up to the Templar’s challenge.

  “Who do you think you are to speak to me in such a fashion, in my own home?”

  Thulmann began to pace, his hand opening and closing about the hilt of his sword. He stalked past the small writing table situated near the corner of the room, its surface pitted by age beneath its sheen, a well-worn Book of Sigmar dominating its surface.

  Above the table, fixed to the wall was a wooden plaque upon which had been fixed the seal of Sigmar, the sigil of the twin-tailed comet that was given to every witch hunter. Thulmann scowled as he considered that it had once been worn by the patriarch. It was a struggle for the witch hunter not to rip it from its fixture. “I have not dragged the story in its full from Kohl,” he snarled, turning away from the offending plaque. “But be certain that I shall. My man is a hedonist, a thug and a drunkard, but when it comes to the art of torture, he is a prodigy. What little I did glean from his semi-coherent ramblings already turns my stomach. Preying upon your own people! Offering them up in pagan sacrifice in return for some sorcerous protection!”

  “You dare!” shouted Wilhelm, his entire body trembling from the emotion swelling up within him. “I deny these filthy allegations! How dare you accuse me, I, who have served the temple and the Empire with devout loyalty my entire life!” The old man
’s withered claw rose, swiping at the air. “Get out of my house!” he roared.

  “You have no authority here, your lordship!” spat Thulmann, stalking forward like some great beast. “This farce is at an end!” he added with a snarl. “All you deny is the glory and might of Holy Sigmar!” The door began to open behind him, a liveried servant moving to enter in answer to Wilhelm’s summons. The witch hunter grabbed the handle, slamming the portal shut in the man’s face.

  “You, a servant of Sigmar,” the witch hunter sneered, voice dripping with venomous contempt. “Be thankful that I was in time to stop your steward from completing the obscenity he contemplated this night. It will be one less crime to answer for when you stand before Sigmar and are judged for your blasphemies.”

  The Templar stalked past the foot of the bed once more, passing before the old man’s massive wardrobe and a glass-faced cupboard that held musty relics from Wilhelm’s time of service to the temple.

  Wilhelm Klausner seemed to wilt as he heard Thulmann’s words. He lifted a trembling hand to his mouth. “You… you stopped…” A look of absolute terror came upon him and he gave voice to a rattling sob that seemed to surge from the very pits of his soul. “Now we are doomed,” the old man groaned.

  “You were doomed and damned when you chose to forsake the might of Sigmar and put your faith in profane sorceries to preserve you from evil,” the witch hunter rebuked him. The door behind him opened once again. This time it was no servant, but a livid Anton Klausner who stood outside. The younger Klausner stepped into the room, his face contorted with his own indignant fury.

  “What the devil are you…” The young noble’s words were cut off as he spoke. Thulmann’s gloved hand shot from the hilt of his blade, striking Anton across the face with the back of his hand with such force that the young man was thrown to the floor, falling beside the hearth. Thulmann glared down into Anton’s face as the boy reached for his own weapon.

  “Draw that blade but an inch,” the witch hunter growled, “and I shall paint that wall with your life’s blood, be you guilty of your father’s heresies or no.” The cold, chill manner in which Thulmann spoke his threat caused Anton to back down, the young Klausner daubing at the thin trickle of blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

  The boy turned his gaze from the glowering witch hunter to the withered old man on his sick bed.

  Anton stared in bewilderment at the expression on his father’s face. Written upon that aged visage was misery and defeat and shame, emotions Anton had never before seen exhibited by his always stern and stalwart father. More, there was the agonised appeal in old Wilhelm’s eyes, the desperate cry for pity and understanding and forgiveness.

  Anton felt contempt boil within his heart. After all these years, long years of trying to prove his value to the old man, and now it was his father who showed himself to be of no value. Wilhelm Klausner had given everything to his eldest son. To Anton, he had given only his name, and Anton had taken great pride in that name and in the long history of honour and tradition that graced it. The name of Klausner was what made him important, made him better than the swineherds and farmers. He could clearly see the guilt in his father’s face, more evident even than the old man’s shame and fear.

  Wilhelm Klausner had given Anton his name, and now he was taking even that away from him, staining it with such crimes that he had drawn the attention of an outlander witch hunter.

  The youth bared his teeth in a feral snarl, picking himself from the floor and storming from the room, slamming the door behind him. Thulmann again fixed Wilhelm with his harsh gaze.

  “I know not how deep this heresy runs,” he spat, “but I will find out! I will learn the root of this madness that has infected you and your household and I will burn it from the face of the Empire!”

  Anton Klausner smashed his fist against the hard stone wall, giving voice to an inarticulate howl of animal rage. How dare that old man! How dare he! Anton would not have believed anything the witch hunter said, anything that anyone said. But he had seen the truth in his father’s eyes, the dismal guilt and self-loathing, the resignation to a long-deferred doom.

  The youth howled again. He would not cry, he would not shed a tear for the old bastard.

  Anton looked below to see Gregor racing up the steps, taking them two at a time. The other Klausner son had finished conducting Streng and his prisoner to the old dungeon and was now desperate to reach his father, to hear for himself Wilhelm’s reaction to the witch hunter’s accusations.

  Despite the firm conviction that gripped Thulmann, and Gregor’s own disturbing discovery of the family ring at the Brustholz farm, the young noble could not bring himself to believe his father guilty of participating in such an unholy conspiracy.

  “What has happened?” Gregor called out to Anton as he approached his brother, seeing the violent distress on Anton’s face, the blood trickling from his bruised mouth and savaged hand.

  Anton’s gaze was as cold as the winds of Kislev. “Ruin,” Anton answered. “Ruin has come upon us. Your witch hunter friend has destroyed us.” Anton’s face twisted about into a grim sneer. “Oh, maybe you,” he laughed without mirth. “You’ll still get the title and the lands and the power! But all I had was the name, the name of Klausner and the legacy of honour and valour that accompanied it!” He clenched his bruised fist. “It’s being stripped away! The witch hunter won’t leave that! When he is finished, there will be no honour left!”

  “He is with father?” Gregor asked. The murderous hatred in Anton’s eyes caused him to recoil.

  “That sick old heretic bastard up there is no father of mine,” he spat, storming past Gregor, shouting for his ruffian cronies. Gregor watched his brother, shaking his head, then continued on to his father’s room.

  Gregor found the witch hunter pacing across his father’s room, his body trembling with every step, his hand clenching and unclenching about the hilt of his sword. The old man on the bed seemed even more shrunken and withered than before, looking like a pile of old, tired bones. Something had been taken from his father, some vital spark, and its absence had diminished the old man hideously.

  Thulmann turned on Gregor as the young noble entered. The Templar’s face retained its mask of grim judgement and for a moment, Gregor actually thought that he was going to draw his sword.

  “This does not concern you, Gregor,” the witch hunter told him. “If there is one man in this entire district who is innocent of this heresy, it is you.” Thulmann closed his eyes, a tiny fraction of his rage escaping him in a sigh. “Your marksmanship earlier this evening proved that.” When he opened his eyes, the intensity flared up again. “Leave this room.”

  The young noble stood his ground. “He is my father,” Gregor said. The words caused Wilhelm’s face to twist in pain and an agonised groan to hiss from his wasted body.

  “He is a heretic and a murderer,” Thulmann snarled. “He knew about his steward’s blasphemous practices. At best, he turned a blind eye to them. At worst, he condoned these profane rites’

  Or orchestrated them, Gregor thought, his eyes turning toward the Klausner coat of arms fixed above the hearth and considering the ring that bore that heraldry still secreted in his pocket. He looked again at his father. The old man lowered his eyes, as though too ashamed to face his son. Gregor shook his head. “Whatever he has done,” he repeated. “He is my father.”

  “Whatever he has done,” echoed Thulmann. He sneered at the patriarch. “And what have you done? To what depths of obscenity have you sunk? How many people have you seduced into this loathsome sorcery?” He shook his fist at the old man. “I will have my answers,” he warned. “By the temple, I’ll have my answers, if I have to rip them from you with whip and knife!”

  Gregor clutched at the witch hunter’s arm. “You would not dare!” he gasped in horror.

  Thulmann’s expression grew grave. He could sympathise with the young noble’s emotions, the affection and love he had always known for his father we
re not so easy to banish. Still, for the sake of all those who had been so ruthlessly slaughtered, he would not be dissuaded from that which needed to be done.

  “I’ll have my answers,” he repeated coldly. “Leave now.” The witch hunter stabbed his finger at the door. “Now!” he snarled. Gregor strode instead to the small side door that led to his father’s private chapel.

  “You are wrong,” he said, his voice heavy with doubt even as he said the words. “My father couldn’t…”

  “He has,” Thulmann spat, glaring once more at the wretched creature on the bed. “Look at the guilt gnawing at him, the shame of his unmasking. Wilhelm Klausner, witch hunter,” Thulmann snorted in contempt. “Wilhelm Klausner, necromancer and sorcerer is nearer the truth.” He looked at Gregor, studying the younger man’s face. “You know that I’m right.”

  Gregor swallowed the lump that swelled in his throat. “I will pray for you. Pray that Sigmar will rid you of these hideous delusions that beset you.”

  “Pray instead for your father’s black soul, that Sigmar might show it some of the mercy this animal never showed his victims,” the witch hunter retorted.

  “Do not harm him,” Gregor warned. “I will be able to hear all that occurs in this room.” Wilhelm clenched his teeth in agony as he heard his son’s words. The witch hunter merely nodded.

  “I will not do him injury,” Thulmann said in a chill hiss. “Not until he ceases to answer my questions. When that time comes, you can help me destroy this legacy of evil, or you can become a victim of it. That choice I leave to you.”

  Gregor said nothing more, but left the room, slamming the chapel door behind him.

  “Don’t harm him,” Wilhelm implored in a dry rasp.

  Thulmann stared down his nose at the wasted old man. “My sons are innocent of the evil I have been guilty of. I would not let it touch them.”