[Mathias Thulmann 01] - Witch Hunter Read online

  Tears coursed down Anton’s face and the block of masonry fell from his shaking hands. His breath stopped, even his heart seemed to slow.

  It was there, the young noble knew, in the darkness behind him, lurking within the shadows cast by the few remnants of the building’s roof. It was something horrible and foul, something of such unholy terror that the mere sight of it would destroy him.

  Anton began to weep freely now, the sounds harkening back to the crib, back to the multitude of childhood phantoms and fiends that had prowled the nursery until his cries had brought his nanny running with a lantern to chase them away again. He would not look at it, he would not see it. He would close his eyes and hide his head and wait for nanny to chase it away. Whatever happened, he would not turn. He would not look at it.

  Anton Klausner shifted his position, turning his body to face the darkness. Despite his terrified conviction, an urge had come upon him, a command that seemed to burn into his brain, a compulsion that did not originate from his own mind but from another’s. His eyes grew wider and wider until they seemed that they might pop and the only sound that now came from him was an inarticulate whimper.

  A part of the darkness glided forward, moving more like a wisp of smoke than any mortal’s step. The shape was tall and thin and decayed. It wore a long black robe about its reed-like shape, a robe with a leather collar that looked as though it had been stitched together from the wings of bats. Chains and leather cords dripped from the garment, each string ending in some morbid talisman. Here, a cord of severed human and inhuman ears, there the tiny pickled hand of an unborn infant. Upon the hem of the garment the picture-writing of long-dead Khemri had been stitched in golden thread.

  The arms of the figure were long and cadaverous, the hands protruding from the sleeves of the robe. They were thin and desiccated, the skin grey, corrupt and rotten. Long nails, like the talons of a vulture, tipped each of the fingers, the enamel hardened into a shiny brown surface that resembled the back of a corpse beetle.

  The apparition’s head was shrunken and withered, little more than a skull with a thin covering of grey, leathery skin wrapped about it, its bald pate covered by a rounded cap of black velvet from which grinned the skeletal face of a dead bat. Long, pointed ears flanked either side of the misshapen head, looking as though they had been cut from the head of a wolf and stitched onto the monster’s skull. The face of the creature was that of a death’s head, the nose fallen away long ago, the eyes withdrawn into their pits, lips pulled back from the oversized jaw. The teeth alone carried with them a hint of vitality, shining like polished ivory, the eye-teeth grown into ghastly, rat-like incisors.

  The vampire’s smouldering eyes suddenly gleamed with a terrible and unclean vigour. The creature stretched forth its hand and Anton could do nothing except obey the unspoken summons.

  The youth took a slow, shambling step toward the ancient monster. The vampire closed its eyes, hiding their unnatural light, and its shrunken chest drew a deep breath.

  “A Klausner,” the thing’s voice hissed like leaves crawling across a grave. “I will never forget the smell of that blood, no matter how many lifetimes have fallen into dust.” The vampire’s eyes blinked back into unholy life. Its corpse-face stared at Anton, the leathery flesh pulling back into a malevolent grin. “The hour has indeed grown dark,” it observed.

  The vampire shifted its gaze to consider the man who had approached from behind the unmoving skeletons.

  “A most rare gift,” Carandini said, bowing his head slightly in deference to his ally. “Something to display my commitment to our common purpose.” The necromancer smiled ingenuously, not caring that the undead monster might read his expression. “Something to display my loyalty,” he added in what was only marginally a servile tone.

  “One that is appreciated,” the vampire said, its withered face puckering into a sneer. “What other things have you observed this day?” it asked, the hollow voice brimming with suspicion.

  “The witch hunter has stopped the Klausner’s ritual,” Carandini told the vampire. “Without any new blood to bolster it, the protective circle will collapse. We shall be able to proceed very soon.”

  The necromancer smiled as he added the lie to the truth. The witch hunter had indeed stopped the ritual, but that event’s debilitating effect upon the wards had been much quicker and more profound than he wished his confederate to know. Carandini had seen with his own eyes his skeleton warriors carried across the stream that marked the boundary, the line over which the restless dead could not normally cross. He had seen, too, those same skeletons unharmed by that passage.

  The vampire smiled back at Carandini. It knew that it could not trust the mortal, any more than any of the living could be trusted. It knew what Carandini had seen, ripping the images from Anton Klausner’s mind. The circle was already down. The necromancer’s usefulness was at an end.

  The monster fought down the urge to destroy the sneering, scheming wizard. Did he dare to think that his feeble deceptions would trick Sibbechai, that his transparent manipulations would trap the vampire? Did he think that the vampire would fall upon the Klausner pup like some blood-hungry von Carstein, slaking its thirst for vengeance upon this sorry mortal while the necromancer stole past the defeated wards and made off with the real treasure?

  “How shall we proceed?” the vampire asked. The necromancer smiled back at him.

  “In a day or so, the wards will lose their power. Then we can strike,” he replied.

  “Perhaps they are already weakened,” the vampire said, voicing the thing they both knew to be the true. “I am not so easily dissuaded as one of your battlefield relics,” the monster observed, enjoying the flare of anger that worked itself onto Carandini’s face as he heard Sibbechai diminish the necromancer’s powers.

  “I would remind you that your curs could not cross the wards either,” the necromancer retorted. “I would also remind you that you did not know the secret rites that would weaken those same wards’ The necromancer smiled coldly at the vampire. “For all your knowledge,” he added with another sneer. “Besides, even if you could cross, there is the problem of gaining entry to the keep. Something one of your kind should find difficult.”

  The vampire grinned back, an expression as much of menace as of triumph. The scheming idiot had solved that problem on his own, though he did not see it. Sibbechai shifted its gaze to the trembling, transfixed Anton. Carandini followed the gesture and what little colour there was in his pasty skin faded. Sibbechai let the necromancer’s understanding of what he had done sink in.

  “A very fine gift,” the vampire hissed. It closed its eyes, picking into the tangle of thoughts and emotions crawling within Anton’s soul. Sibbechai opened its eyes again, releasing a fraction of its control over the youth. There was an irony, a deep irony to what the vampire had in mind now, though it had long ago ceased to be human enough to appreciate it. The vampire tilted its arm, exposing its wrist. With the talons on its other hand, it slashed through the rotten skin. Thin black filth oozed up from the injury.

  “I offer you what your father has denied you,” Sibbechai told the youth. “I offer you purpose. I shall raise you above the peasant cattle. You shall become an aristocrat of the night, and mighty shall be your name. Men will tremble in fear of you and your power shall know no end.”

  The vampire’s face twisted in macabre mirth as it read the crude, simple desires and the smouldering resentments of the young noble. “I shall help you to avenge the dishonour your father has brought upon you and he will know the power and strength of your will before he dies.” The vampire released the rest of its control over Anton Klausner. The youth shook, trembling still with the unnatural terror which the vampire’s presence evoked. But he stood his ground, for all his shivering, for all the fear in his eyes.

  “Drink,” Sibbechai said, lifting its bleeding wrist. “Drink and all that I have promised will be yours.” In so much as you shall be my slave until I tire of you.

/>   The vampire sneered as he saw the youth struggle with his decision. It already knew how Anton would decide, knowing the young noble’s mind better than he knew it himself. Anton lowered his head, his warm lips touching the cold, clammy skin of the vampire. He sucked at the dark liquid drooling from the monster’s wound. Sibbechai let only the smallest portion pass Anton’s lips before wrenching its arm away.

  “We share the same blood,” the vampire hissed, watching as Anton staggered and fell, Overcome by the power now racing through his body. The vampire looked over at Carandini, studying the necromancer’s anxious face. “Be not dismayed, necromancer. I shall go myself. You may remain behind, where it is safe.”

  “I would happily accompany you,” Carandini protested, hands toying with the cuffs of his cassock.

  “Your newly found valour,” Sibbechai shook its head, its voice rumbling with a dangerous mirth. “Why does it fill me with such…” the vampire paused as though struggling to find the right word. “Uneasiness?” it said at last.

  “No, you shall stay here,” Sibbechai proclaimed. “I shall go.” Its voice slipped into a malevolent whisper. “I shall reclaim that which is mine!”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Sibbechai.” Thulmann repeated the name. He cast his thoughts back to his study of the Klausner family records. It was the name of the vampire that Helmuth Klausner had hunted to the cursed city Mordheim and destroyed five hundred years ago. The witch hunter knew that a vampire’s destruction was sometimes a nebulous thing and that at certain times, and by certain rites of such horror that they defied the most morbid imagination, such creatures could be called back from the realm of the dead. He also knew that a vampire was like a dragon: age did not diminish its potency but rather increased its power and malevolence.

  What might this creature Sibbechai have become after five hundred years?

  Wilhelm dipped his head in a solemn nod. “Yes,” the patriarch said. “The great shadow that has haunted my family from the very beginning. A vampire sorcerer, a monster of loathsome and awful power. One of that most obscene of the profane breeds of vampire—a necrarch.” The old man spoke the last word only as a frightened whisper. Thulmann made the sign of the hammer as he heard the evil name spoken.

  A necrarch. Vampires were an unclean, loathsome kind of being, lurking among the people of the Empire like wolves prowling among sheep. Except during certain times of decadent permissiveness on the part of past aristocrats and nobility, it had been the witch hunters’ duty to root out these monsters and destroy them.

  Many were their breeds and diverse were their powers, but above them all, there was one kind that was feared even by the servants of Sigmar: the vampire sorcerers known as the necrarchs, a foul kindred of undead wizards who looked upon the living not simply as prey, but as subjects for their unholy experiments.

  There was a foul and abhorrent tome, kept under lock and key in the lowest vaults of Altdorf’s Great Cathedral, a book of such vile evil that only the most pure and devout of Sigmar’s servants were allowed even to see it. The Liber Mortis of the mad necromancer Vanhel.

  Thulmann had been permitted access to the Liber Mortis, allowed to study fifteen pages of its ghastly text for the space of two hours, a brutish, illiterate temple guard standing at his shoulder, watching him for any sign of corruption. Even now there were times when Vanhel’s spidery script would boil up within the witch hunter’s mind, disturbing his slumber, robbing his food of its taste and perfume of its scent.

  It was a poison of the soul, a tainted knowledge that corrupted all who contemplated it. A glimpse had been enough, perhaps even too much. But in that glimpse, Thulmann had read of the necrarchs, of their foul nature and their abominable ambitions. Vanhel himself had been frightened of them, calling them the “Disciples of the Accursed”. He related the foul prophecy of the progenitor of their bloodline, W’soran, a prophecy that the necrarchs hoped to fulfil. For, like the Great Necromancer himself, the necrarchs dreamed of a world that was still and quiet and cold.

  Other vampires sought power over the living, in one way or another. The necrarchs sought a way to destroy all life, to scour the world of every living thing and leave it as a shadow peopled only by the restless dead.

  If this Sibbechai was one of the filthy breed of the necrarchs, then the Klausners had good reason to know fear.

  “It was long ago, in the Time of the Three Emperors,” Wilhelm continued. “The land was rife with war and ruin. Plague was everywhere. In those days, the name of Klausner was not so well known, they were just another family of merchants. Then plague came to the town of Gruebelhof.” Wilhelm looked at the witch hunter, and it was a look of pain, the mark of a man who was about to confess some great shame. “The plague struck down most of the Klausner line, laying low the old and the young, wiping away in an instant almost three generations. The priests and healers could do nothing, even when one among the priesthood bore the same name.

  “Helmuth watched in horror as the plague devoured his family. At last, only his brother Hessrich and Hessrich’s wife and daughter remained. Hessrich was determined to save his family, and did not intend to leave their survival in the hands of the gods. He had learned a few heathen practices from an old witch who dwelled outside the village, petty magic that might make his family resist the plague. Hessrich saw the potency of the hag’s spell and he left Gruebelhof in search of a sorcery mightier still, a sorcery that would make his family immune to the disease.

  “In his absence, the heathen rites practised by Hessrich’s wife were discovered by their neighbours. She was denounced as a witch, put in irons and cast into jail. Helmuth pleaded desperately to save them, but he was powerless before the will of the townspeople and his brother’s wife and their young daughter were burnt at the stake.”

  Wilhelm paused, licking his lips nervously as he considered the next part of the tale. “The smoke was still rising from their pyre when Hessrich returned. He had found the knowledge he had sought. He had travelled to a shunned and haunted tower and been captured by the thing that dwelt there. Despite his terror, Hessrich had pled with his captor to release him so he might find the magic he needed to save his family. In its twisted humour, the vampire had offered not only to release him, but to give him the knowledge he needed as well. All Hessrich had to do was drink the vile liquid that coursed through the monster’s veins and be inducted into its unclean brotherhood. Hessrich died in that nameless tower, transformed into one of the undead. The newborn monster took a name of power, discarding forever the name of Klausner. Its new name was Sibbechai and it was a man no longer.

  “Sibbechai’s rage was great and terrible when it learned what had been done, for the salvation of Hessrich’s family had been the only lingering shred of humanity left in the creature. It massacred over half of the already plague-wracked town before the priests were able to drive it away. Amid the carnage wrought by the thing that had been his brother, Helmuth swore a grim oath to atone for the horrors of Sibbechai and not to rest until the vampire had been destroyed.

  “Across the Empire he hunted the beast, stalking it through lands haunted by war and disease, until at last, the monster came to the cursed ruin that had been the great city of Mordheim. It was there that Helmuth confronted the monster and terrible was their battle. After hours of combat, Helmuth fell and the vampire leapt after him in a frenzied madness of bloodlust and hate. In its violent pounce, the monster did not see the broken spear gripped in Helmuth’s hands. It impaled itself upon the weapon and with a final shriek of malevolence and profanity, it died.”

  “But the monster did not stay dead,” observed Thulmann, listening intently to every nuance in Wilhelm’s tale. Wilhelm shook his head.

  “Helmuth was too fatigued from his battle to destroy the remains properly and he was compelled to leave the shunned ruins. It took him three days to gather together a strong enough force of fellow witch hunters and mercenary hirelings to return. When he did, they found no trace of the vampire’s
body.

  “Helmuth prayed that some foul beast, some nameless creature of Chaos from the Cursed Pit had devoured Sibbechai’s remains. But it was not so. Within a year, as he scoured the Empire, purging it of sorcerers and mutants, Helmuth learned that the vampire had survived. It eluded his efforts to track it down, lingering just beyond his reach, a vengeful spectre waiting to strike at him whenever he let down his guard.

  “So it has ever been for the Klausners,” Wilhelm continued. “The men of the Klausner line have always tried to hunt down this loathsome beast, but never have they succeeded in destroying it. Over the centuries, many of the descendants of Helmuth have fallen victim to the vampire Sibbechai and the threat of the fiend’s undying lust for vengeance has never diminished.”

  Thulmann was quiet for a moment as he reflected upon the old man’s story, pacing the room as he contemplated the tale. At length, he spun about, his voice snapping like a whip. “But this does not explain the foul necromancy your family is guilty of. You have told me the reason for it, but not its cause! To save yourselves from the vampire, yes, but how did this abominable practice come to be? How did corruption burrow its way into the pious legacy of the Klausners?”

  “It has been with us from the beginning,” Wilhelm relented. “It was Helmuth who first performed the ritual of protection, so the family he made for himself after the era of the Three Emperors might not be claimed by his undead enemy. And the ritual has been handed down ever since, tied into the title and legacy. At the end of his life, each father inducts his eldest son into the secret.”

  “And have you told Gregor yet?” the witch hunter demanded. The old man wilted back into his covers, a long sigh shuddering from his chest.