[Mathias Thulmann 01] - Witch Hunter Read online

  The witch hunter smiled back, an expression as cruel and malevolent as any that had ever been cast in stone upon the Great Temple’s gargoyles.

  “Convince me,” Thulmann commanded.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Anton Klausner and his three closest cronies galloped down the winding path through the blighted woods that surrounded Klausner Keep.

  The young noble’s mind brooded upon the drama he had left unfolding in the fortress behind him. He refused to accept the events, lashing his steed to greater effort as anger welled up within him.

  The horror that had been preying upon the countryside was no doing of his father, it simply could not be. What end would it serve? These killings did nothing but weaken the power and authority of the Klausners within their own district. No, this out-lander witch hunter had some other motive behind his accusations, some conjuration of the family’s enemies. He had twisted the old man’s feeble mind into believing these falsehoods, into accepting them as the truth.

  Such were the lies Anton told himself. He did not care overmuch if his father really was guilty of that which he had been accused, nor did he really find himself disturbed by the thought of the old man ending his life screaming upon a rack or tied to a stake.

  All his life, Anton had tried to measure up to the old man’s ideals, and yet, when he had become old enough, when he was at last man enough to go forth and earn his own legacy of honour and accomplishment, the spiteful old tyrant had denied him the opportunity. Gregor, dear Gregor, the elder son, would inherit the title and the lands and the power.

  What would Anton have if he did not go out and win it for himself? Nothing, only the name of Klausner and the aged heritage of tradition and honour that was a part of that name. Now even that was going to be taken from him. Anton was not going to allow such a thing to happen.

  Anton glanced aside at his men. They would show this witch hunter. They would go out and find a more expedient culprit for the murders, find him and bring his mangled body back to the keep, show this outlander swine how wild and baseless his mad accusations were. He would pull his father out of the pit of dishonour and scandal he had dug for himself and which the miserable, thoughtless fool was seemingly resigned to.

  Anton sneered as he imagined the old man’s gratitude. Perhaps then he would see his younger son’s worth and value. All the young noble need do now was settle on which miserable wretch from the village he would say was responsible for the murders.

  The horses thundered across the tiny bridge that spanned the stream where Thulmann and Gregor had had their remarkable escape from the undead wolves. There was still a darkened stain, like a burned outline, upon the wooden surface where the wolf had been destroyed. Anton paid the crossing no notice, intent upon his own dark thoughts. However, when the horse of one of his comrades gave a sharp whinny of terror, the young man gazed around him in alarm.

  They had ridden into the narrow pathway that snaked its course among the sickened trees and crumbling elf ruins, where not so long ago Anton’s own brother had been beset by the restless dead.

  Dead things stirred once more upon the edge of the blighted wood, prowling the borderlands of the Klausner domain. Anton could see them shambling out from behind the trees in a rotting, mouldering horde. Limbs picked clean of flesh groped toward the riders as grinning skulls opened their jaws in soundless howls of battle. Rusted swords and crumbling axes lashed out.

  Anton could see that one of his friends was down already, his horse gutted by a corroded axe. Three of the skeletal horrors loomed over the thrown rider, their weapons rising and falling like the hammers of clockwork bell-ringers. The screams of the man weakened, then stopped.

  “Holy Sigmar!” Anton shouted in terror. The youth tore his sword from its scabbard. One of his friends tried to ride through the horde as they began to converge upon the path ahead. The man’s steed slammed into the rotting figures, bowling the first few ranks aside as though they were tenpins. But as it plunged deeper into the host, the charge lost its impetus, the horse was slowed by the clutching hands and by the rusted blades that tore at its legs and flanks. A ghastly wail like the sound of a soul tossed into the Pit exploded from the rider’s lungs as the skeletons pulled down his weakened steed, and he disappeared beneath the bodies of his foes.

  Anton Klausner lashed out desperately as the skeletons continued to pour from the trees, his sword smashing into bleached skulls and decayed shoulders.

  Sometimes, his blows would splinter the bone, crashing into the fleshless horrors with such force that their animated bodies would come apart, falling into a jumble of shattered bone and rotten armour. Other times, he would only succeed in causing a crack in the sorcerously reanimated bone, and the unfeeling monster would continue to press forward, requiring repeated blows to finally arrest its advance.

  Anton struck to the left and right, his blows finding targets wherever he turned. In the span of only a few seconds, he brought down five of the undead abominations, and still they came at him, neither noticing nor caring about the fate of their comrades. There seemed no end to the monsters. To every side, Anton could see only the grinning, fleshless heads of things newly called from their graves.

  Beside him, his last companion finally faltered, flinging his sword into the face of one of his skeletal attackers and jerking the head of his horse so sharply that he nearly overturned the animal. The skeletons rushed upon him, even as he spurred his mount to flee.

  The horse galloped away seven of the undead monsters clinging to it, either by means of their claw-like hands or the rusty blades they had buried in the animal’s flesh. The terrified animal raced across the bridge, carrying its horrible cargo along with it. The skeletons held firm, however, and soon dragged the faltering brute down by means of their continued attacks. Not so very far from the scorched timber that marked the dire wolfs destruction, the undead warriors hacked Anton’s friend to bits.

  Anton did not see his comrade die, however. Beset on all sides, at last several of the monsters penetrated his own desperate defence. His horse gave vent to a sound that was almost eerily human as it was dragged down.

  Anton tried to fend off the blows that followed as his horse struck the ground, and he along with it, but grasping claws ripped his sword from his hand. The young noble looked up, his vision filled with the grinning, eyeless countenances of his unnatural enemies. Rusty swords and crumbling spears were raised above him, poised to strike.

  “No,” Carandini’s voice slithered from the night. The necromancer pushed his way through the mouldering ranks of his soldiers, his children of the grave. “This one does not die so easily” He stared down at Anton, a greasy smile working itself upon his face. “I think that my friend will want to see this one.” Carandini snapped his fingers and the skeletal warriors seized Anton Klausner, dragging the screaming man from beneath his horse.

  Carandini followed behind the skeletons as they carried their prisoner into the darkness.

  “Oh yes,” the necromancer hissed. “I am most certain that he will be pleased to see you.”

  Gregor closed the door behind him, lingering for a moment just beyond the threshold. He could hear the angry voice of the witch hunter shouting in the room he had just left, haranguing his father once more. Much softer, almost inaudible, were the old patriarch’s subdued responses. Gregor fought to keep the emotion from his face. He needed to be strong now, not give way to the hopeless despair that gnawed at him. There was a way out of this horror, there had to be.

  The young noble’s face dropped as he fingered the ring in his pocket. He considered the possibility, nay, the probability that his father truly was guilty of all the witch hunter accused him of. The thought had preyed upon Gregor for days now, and it was one that even his love for the old man could not fend off.

  The ring old Wilhelm had worn afterwards could have been a copy. Tradition held it that the patriarch’s ring was the same one worn by Helmuth Klausner five hundred years ago, handed down from father
to son along with the tide and lands. But who was to say that it was the same ring? There could have been any number of copies made over the years, perhaps with the originals buried in the vaults with the men who had worn them in life. If such was the case, Wilhelm would have known this and had one of these rings taken from the old graves when he discovered that his own had been lost.

  Gregor knew what he must do. He must help the witch hunter. He must do his duty to the Empire, to Sigmar and help discover the source of this horror that had overwhelmed his father’s mind. But Gregor also knew what helping the witch hunter would mean; he knew what fate Thulmann would put his father to.

  On the road back to the keep, Streng had taken a sadistic pleasure in describing the atrocities he would visit upon Kohl, gleefully illustrating for the wounded steward how flesh might be scraped from bone without the victim losing consciousness.

  Gregor knew that Thulmann would not spare his father from similar torments simply because of his position or his former role as a witch hunter himself. He had seen the outrage, the fury in Thulmann’s eyes. He took the descent of a former witch hunter into such vileness as a personal affront, a slight upon the temple itself.

  Thulmann would not rest until every life taken by Wilhelm and Kohl had been avenged through torment. Gregor felt sorrow and regret for the lives that had been lost. For Kohl, he could summon not even the shadow of pity, but his father, how could he leave the old man to such a miserable end?

  Gregor turned, walking toward the altar. He needed to pray, needed to beg at the shrine of his god that the madness that had risen up to devour his world could be pushed back, that all could go back to what it had been. He stopped when he saw a figure crouched before the altar, its form covered in a long black cloak. The shape moved its head, the hood falling away from a head of greying hair.

  Ilsa Klausner smiled at her son, a pained expression that spoke more than Gregor wanted to hear.

  “How long have you been here?” Gregor managed to ask after a few moments.

  “Long enough,” his mother responded, her voice old and dry. “Long enough to know that it has all come to an end.” She looked toward the door through which Gregor had only moments before passed. Her face was moist with the shimmer of tears. “You knew?” Gregor gasped. “You knew about this all the time?” A new horror squirmed through Gregor’s soul. The woman shook her head.

  “No,” she told him. “I did not know. I did not know because I did not want to know. I loved your father. I still do and always shall, whatever that may cost me.” She looked deep into her son’s eyes. “And know this, Gregor, above all else, he loved us. We were his light, his life, his soul. Whatever he did in his life, he did it because he wanted to protect us, to keep his family safe. That was all that mattered to him. Whatever he has done, it was not toward some selfish end. It was to keep us safe.”

  Gregor extended his hand, leaning against the wall to support a body that had suddenly grown weak. He had just begun to resign himself to the fact that his father was a monster, a bloodthirsty beast who preyed upon the countryside with his unholy hunger. Now his mother had bolstered his doubts and rekindled his fears.

  “I think, whatever he has done, whatever secret he and Ivar shared, it is a very old secret.” Her eyes hardened even as her voice grew quiet. “Remember, Ivar was your grandfather’s steward before he served your father. And Ivar’s grandfather was steward before him…”

  Gregor’s eyes grew wide with shock as he considered the path to which her mother’s frightful statement might lead. He thought again of the old monument buried, hidden, within the blighted woods. He thought of the old legends, stretching back into the mists of time. The Klausner daemon. How aptly had it been named, for it was not a daemon that sought to prey upon the Klausners, but the Klausners themselves who were the daemon.

  “You should go to him,” Gregor said in a soft voice. “Before… Before the witch hunter…” Ilsa Klausner shook her head.

  “He would not endure the shame of it,” she told him. “And, may Sigmar forgive me, I could not see that sort of pain in his eyes’

  Gregor thought of the crushed, degraded and humiliated creature that had gazed upon him from his sick bed and knew that his mother was right.

  “Then all we can do is pray,” the young noble said, dropping to his knees beside his mother. “All we can do is pray that Sigmar will take my father’s misguided soul before the witch hunter begins his work.”

  “A family secret then?” Thulmann’s sharp words lashed out like the barbed end of a whip. “Some unspeakable pact between your ancestors and the Dark Gods?” The witch hunter slammed his hand against the polished headboard with a violent thump. “Speak damn you! I will know how far back this profane taint extends itself! I’ve seen the hidden monument on your property! I’ve heard the legends they whisper in the village! Tell me when this nightmare began! Confess, man, and lessen the taint that has swallowed your soul!”

  Wilhelm turned his eyes toward the ceiling. They were dull, almost lifeless, filled with a terrible weariness. His lips trembled as if stricken with palsy. When he spoke, it was in a rasping croak. “The ritual was never meant to go so far,” he said, almost imploring his accuser to believe him. “Ever before, it had only taken six to complete the circle.” He could see the fiery gleam burning in Thulmann’s gaze and hastened to explain further. “The circle was meant to protect, to safeguard the keep and the lands around it. Nothing more!”

  “You sent six innocent souls to their graves and you call that nothing!” snapped the witch hunter.

  Wilhelm drew himself back, a fragment of his old strength surging into him.

  “Six peasants, six dullard farmers and swineherds who could not even write their own names. Six sorry specimens of humanity to preserve the line of Klausner, to produce sons who would carry on the fight to the enemy, who would serve the temple as its sword and hammer.”

  Wilhelm’s voice trembled with the violence in his words. It was an echo of the argument he had heard Ivar Kohl use upon him many times, an echo of the last words he had heard uttered by his own father upon his deathbed. It was an argument that even now, Wilhelm fought desperately to believe.

  “I notice that you have forbidden your own sons to carry on that tradition,” Thulmann sneered. “Reconsidering the hypocrisy of your heritage? Deciding to embrace your pagan beliefs in full perhaps? Does that explain why so many have died, to proclaim your loyalty to your new masters?”

  Anguished horror filled Wilhelm’s face, the horror of a guilty man desperate to explain the motives behind his crime or desperate to have them believed.

  “No! I have never allowed my sons to know of this hideous legacy! I would not let them be destroyed and damned as I have been! That is why I forbade them to serve the temple, and why I took measures to ensure that the ritual need never be performed again! I could never allow them to become what I have become.” The patriarch’s words drifted off into a miserable sob.

  “But something went wrong,” Thulmann snapped, not giving the old man a second to compose himself. “Something went wrong and it was not six who had to die. Nor seven. Nor eight,” with each statement, the old man covered his ears and moaned in horror. “What were you hoping to accomplish! What went wrong with your profane rites this time!”

  Wilhelm’s eyes had become black pits of despair. “The enemy had some new trick, some powers it had never had before. Only the blood from half the deaths stains my hands, the others were the work of… it. It performed its own rites, its own dark sorcery, and those rites undid the power of Kohl’s rituals. With every new murder, the circle of protection began to weaken. Ivar had to kill again and again just to maintain the circle’s power.” The old man looked at Thulmann again, and the fear the witch hunter saw there was of such intensity that even he had never seen its like. “You stopped him tonight,” the old man’s finger shook as he pointed at Thulmann. “The circle is broken now, and it will come and kill us all.”

  “Wh
at will come?” Thulmann demanded, the hair on the back of his neck prickling with foreboding.

  “The enemy that has haunted my line since the very beginning,” the old man replied. His voice dropped into a horrified hiss as he spoke the name, the strength seeming to drain out of him once more as the syllables left his lips.

  “Sibbechai.”

  Anton Klausner was thrown to the ground, his arm tearing itself open upon the jagged rubble. The youth ignored the pain, however, scrambling behind a crumbling block of stone. He stared in fear at the silent, skeletal shapes that had carried him through the woods to this place, their fleshless claws clutching his arms and legs with grips as strong and chill as the glacial ice of Norsca. The cold wind pulled at the lingering scraps of rotting leather and links of chain armour that clung to their limbs and ribs.

  The animated corpses did not return his gaze, did not appear to still notice the captive they had brought here.

  Anton’s hand closed about a mass of fallen masonry. If he could strike quickly, before the weird, unnatural spark that motivated the dead warriors asserted itself once more, perhaps he could destroy his captors or at least give some account of himself before they hacked him to ribbons as they had his friends.

  There were only four of them, the others had stayed behind, patrolling the section of road where Anton had been ambushed. Even so, it was bad odds, one weaponless man against four undying things from beyond the grave. They were odds that gave Anton pause, made him delay before leaping into a reckless and desperate fight. The decision to act or not was soon taken from him.

  The already cold atmosphere of the ruined cottage suddenly became even colder. Anton shuddered, shocked to see his breath forming into icy mist before him.

  A foul, revolting stench swelled about the ruin, the stink of something long dead, something necrotic and decayed, something rife with a corruption even more loathsome than his silent captors. Fear gnawed at the very depths of Anton’s soul, a fear so profound, so complete and all-consuming that his stomach purged itself without warning and a warm foulness dampened his legs.