[Mathias Thulmann 01] - Witch Hunter Read online

  “The vampire was here,” Thulmann told him. “It came and took the old man. Anton was with it, which is how it gained entry to this place. The boy is a monster now as well.” A sudden thought occurred to the witch hunter. He lifted his eyes toward the upper floor, then pointed at Ilsa Klausner. “I left Gregor with his father,” he told her. Ilsa lifted her hand to her mouth to stifle her horrified gasp. “Go and see to him, if he yet lives!”

  Thulmann ignored the noblewoman as she raced up the stairway, several of her servants hurrying after her. He glared at the remaining staff. “Did any of you see where they went?” he demanded. A grimy, dirt-covered man hesitantly raised his hand. The witch hunter fixed him with a harsh and impatient look.

  “I was outside, in the courtyard,” the man sputtered. “I saw the… the things…”

  “Where did they go?” the witch hunter snapped.

  “It… it looked like his lordship was leading the others… leading them toward the… toward the cemetery.”

  The witch hunter turned away, the gardener’s recollections no longer of any interest to him. He nodded toward Streng. “Come along, you’ll earn your gold tonight,” he said. The mercenary jogged alongside Thulmann as the witch hunter crossed the ravaged hall with long strides.

  It was not long before they were outside within the courtyard, staring at the human debris strewn about the open gate. It seemed that the vampire had been quite thorough about slaughtering all who had witnessed its arrival, from gate guards to stable boys. Streng swallowed nervously as he realised that the injuries he saw had been done without benefit of a trebuchet or cannon. Thulmann was more disconcerted by the fact that the monster had shown no interest in disposing of those who had seen it leave.

  “Where are we going?” the mercenary asked. Thulmann did not look at him, but continued striding toward the open gate.

  “The only place Wilhelm could be taking them,” he said. “The place where all of this started.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mist rolled across the graves, coiling about the headstones, clutching at faded and forgotten names with wispy tendrils of nothingness. From the wasted boughs of an old dead oak, an owl called out into the night while from the dried-out brambles that clustered about the walls of the cemetery a chorus of toads croaked and chirped.

  All sound died away as three figures approached the gate, the aura of dread and malevolence exuding from the group crawling across the graveyard like the icy breath of Morr himself. The toads huddled against the ground, their warty skins burrowing into the soft soil, desperate to hide from the dread that clawed at their tiny amphibian minds. The owl gave one last cry, then took to wing, intent on continuing its mournful song in some less forsaken place.

  The vampire struck the wrought iron gates with its hand, snapping the chain that lashed them together and throwing them open. Its smouldering eyes glared into the pale, perspiring visage of Wilhelm Klausner. The vampire’s lips pulled away from its fangs.

  “Here?” it scoffed.

  “Where better than amongst the dead?” the old patriarch retorted, pushing past Sibbechai, his frail frame shivering from weakness and the cold that had set into his bones. The vampire followed close on the old man’s heels, the thing that had been Anton Klausner striding silently behind them both.

  Wilhelm tottered his way amongst the graves, sometimes lingering to consider a name, to recall a face or some fragment of family history.

  Whatever the witch hunter had said, the Klausners had accomplished a great deal of good over the years, more than enough to atone for the ritual they had handed down from father to son. They were a noble line, with pure intentions and a fervent devotion to Sigmar.

  The fact that in five hundred years not a single Klausner had used Das Buch die Unholden beyond employing the ritual of protection was mute testament to the fact that the family was not corrupt and tainted, not driven by the nameless promises of black magic and blacker gods. The fact that they had kept the profane tome from the clutches of creatures like Sibbechai for hundreds of years was justification for what they had done. It had to be.

  The patriarch glanced behind him, finding the hideous shadow of the necrarch beside him, its gaze smouldering into his own. “Where?” it hissed. The old patriarch pointed toward the massive marble crypt that stood at the very centre of the graveyard.

  “Helmuth’s mausoleum,” Wilhelm said, trying to regain his breath, the nocturnal excursion quickly depleting his thin reserves of strength. “It was entombed with him and has never left the crypt.” The vampire’s claw pushed the old man forward.

  “For the sake of your family, I hope that is so,” snarled Sibbechai. “I have had a very long time to consider how best to destroy this family. Some of the notions that have occurred to me are most inventive.”

  The patriarch did not answer the vampire’s threat, but continued to walk towards the old tomb. As he climbed the short flight of steps set before the squat marble structure, Sibbechai came towards him, hissing a warning into the man’s ear. Then the vampire swept its claw through the cold night air, motioning for Anton to precede them. The vampiric thrall strode forward, exerting its increased strength upon the heavy stone doors. Slowly, the portal began to slide inward.

  A foul, damp smell billowed out of the darkness within the crypt. Sibbechai’s eyes glowed with an eager and desperate hunger.

  “Take me to it,” the creature snarled, pushing Wilhelm forward once more. The old man stumbled up the steps, his eyes watering with regret and shame as he saw the sneering face of what had been his son waiting on the threshold to greet him. Anton snorted derisively as its father passed.

  Wilhelm fumbled about within the darkness of the crypt until he found the lantern and tinder that had been left there. He was under no delusion that his monstrous companions could not see him in the shadows. They would allow the lantern only because they still needed the old man to guide them, but they would not suffer it to allow Wilhelm an advantage. As soon as the old man had the lamp lit, Sibbechai muttered an inarticulate snarl and Anton ripped the lamp from his hands, shoving its father against the wall.

  “Lead the way, old one,” the Anton-thing snapped. Wilhelm nodded weakly, sickened by the empty, soulless sound of the vampire’s voice. With slow, reluctant steps, he strode toward the flight of marble steps that burrowed downward from the small square anteroom. The two vampires filed after him.

  The steps descended some twenty feet beneath the cemetery. Niches cut into the walls held the shrouded remains of past Klausner patriarchs. There were even a few empty niches that would have served Wilhelm and Gregor, had things proceeded along the path they had always followed. The fact was not lost on Anton, and Wilhelm could hear the vampire’s snarl of envious wrath as they passed the empty places.

  The corpses became less complete the deeper they descended, as the hand of time came to rest ever more heavily. Many were now nothing more than fragments of bone and cloth, cobwebs and dust. The stink of slow decay and grave mould managed to make itself known even above the stench of Sibbechai’s rotten flesh.

  A centipede scurried away from the light, creeping back into the crack that had snaked its way down the smooth marble surface. A rat gave a sharp squeak of fright as Sibbechai’s unholy presence offended its senses, the rodent scrabbling at the walls in its desperate attempt to flee before falling dead from fear as the vampire’s shadow fell upon it.

  Ahead, at the bottom of the stairway, a small chamber opened. Wilhelm paused as he stared up at the name carved into the archway, the name of the man who had brought doom and dishonour upon the generations who had followed after him. Then he continued onward, into the clammy darkness of Helmuth’s tomb.

  The light of Anton’s lantern fought to illuminate the tiny chamber, its beams flickering upon the massive stone sarcophagus that filled the centre of the room. Upon the lid of the sarcophagus had been sculpted a life-size image of Helmuth Klausner, depicted in the prime of life, wearing his armour and praye
r beads, hands folded across his chest, the witch hunter’s sword laid out atop his body with the blade pointing at his feet and the pommel upon his lips.

  Sibbechai surged forward, the witch-lights in its face glaring down at the sarcophagus. It had been many centuries since it had last set eyes upon that face, but it was a face that the vampire would not forget should a thousand years come to pass. The vampire stared at the cold stone features, remembering them warm and coursing with a life every bit as perverse as its own…

  The chill of black sorcery set the brooding crows flying into the darkening night above the cursed rubble of Mordheim, croaking their fright at the icy clutch of necromancy in the air about them. The old, crumbling facades of the buildings seemed to become still more decrepit as the years tugged at their decaying structures, hurried along by the foul magic swirling about the ruins.

  Dead things twitched, rigid arms began to flex their rotting muscles and sightless eyes snapped open in decomposing faces. The mangled dead began to stir once more, their spirits dragged back from oblivion to provide a shallow mockery of life to the shells they had worn only moments before.

  Sibbechai’s corrupt visage contorted into a mask of scorn and contempt. “More sorcery, Helmuth?” the vampire hissed. “Is there no limit to your hypocrisy?”

  The witch hunter captain continued to mumble his conjurations, allowing the zombie monsters to shuffle and shamble their way between himself and his undead enemy. “The tools of your loathsome kind can be made to serve the cause of Light,” Helmuth Klausner snarled. “By such perversions is this great land threatened and by such perversions shall every last witch and wizard be driven from the Empire!”

  The vampire paid only partial attention to the witch hunter’s words, watching as the zombie creatures of the madman closed in upon it. The monster’s face twisted with wry amusement. “Is this the best you can do?” Sibbechai laughed. “I find your efforts insulting.”

  Sibbechai launched its lean form forward, the vampire’s clawed hands lashing out, tearing the head from the shoulders of the nearest zombie as easily as a child pulling wings from a fly. The necrarch snarled a word of power and the next zombie toppled, crumbling into dust before it even finished falling to the blood-soaked cobbles. Sibbechai spun about, gesturing with its clawed hand, sending another blast of dark magic searing into a pair of the shuffling corpses, the unholy power turning both cadaver-things into walking torches.

  The vampire was spinning about to smash its way through the last of Helmuth’s zombies when sharp, blinding pain surged through its body. The vampire stared down with revulsion as a pustulent mass spread across its chest, a green morass of goo alive with maggots and filth. The vampire ripped the robe from its withered body, hurling the tainted garment into the face of an approaching zombie, the creature shambling onward a few moments before the writhing corruption ate through its skull and consumed its festering brain.

  Helmuth Klausner snarled as he saw the vampire’s inhumanly quick reflexes react to the pestilential spell the witch hunter had directed at it. Klausner had travelled far to uncover and destroy the corrupted festival, had nearly been killed by the loathsome and bloated priest of Nurgle who had acted as the carnival’s master. He had done so because he had imagined that the spellcraft of such a sorcerer might prove of great use against the restless dead. Fortunately, there was more than one way to burn a bat.

  The witch hunter pulled his heavy blackpowder pistol from its holster of blackened leather. The vampire saw the man’s reaction, the undead abomination not even deigning to consider such a crude device any threat. Sibbechai ripped through another pair of zombies, finding its path to Helmuth unhindered.

  Helmuth returned the corpse-thing’s stare, the fanatic zeal in his veins countering the aura of supernatural malice exuding from the vampire’s eyes. With calm deliberation, Helmuth lifted the pistol, whispering the slithering words he had extracted from the mangled body of a wizard in Averheim, the words of an ancient and pre-human spell of guiding. The pistol cracked and roared as Helmuth depressed the trigger, foul black powder smoke blowing back into his face and causing his eyes to tear.

  The vampire darted aside as the witch hunter’s crude weapon fired. It had fought many men who employed the smelly, unreliable firearms before and had learned that even on the rare occasions when their bullets did strike, they could do the monster no lasting harm.

  But Sibbechai had not reckoned upon the sorcerous augmentation of the witch hunter’s marksmanship, nor the uniqueness of the shot he had loaded into his weapon. The golden ball smashed into the vampire’s shoulder, spinning the necrarch around and slamming it to the ground. Sibbechai snarled in agony and disbelief as it tried to lift itself from the broken cobbles.

  A strange paralysis seemed to spread from its injury, making even its wasted limbs seem as heavy as stone. The witch hunter laughed, slipping his smoking weapon back into its holster.

  “Surprised, monster?” he sneered down at the struggling vampire. “I’ve learned a few new tricks since last our paths crossed.”

  The witch hunter’s boot cracked Sibbechai’s face, smashing the vampire’s rotting nose and spraying filthy black blood about the ground. “I employ a rather unique shot now, graciously provided by a Solkanite inquisitor I encountered in Nuln. Poor misguided fellow, he seemed determined that I was a servant of the Dark Gods, a depraved sorcerer. Can you imagine that?”

  Helmuth kicked the vampire again before stepping away. A thoughtful expression flickered across his face. “I killed him of course. I found that his golden mask, melted down and treated with certain prayers, had a certain amount of usefulness to a man of my calling.” The witch hunter glared down at his foe. “But you’ve discovered that for yourself, haven’t you?”

  Helmuth Klausner called out, his lisping voice a deep and commanding boom. From the dirty shadows where they had hidden themselves, the witch hunter’s followers appeared. They were, for the most part, miserable and dirty creatures, their clothing almost as tattered and ruined as the grave cloth hanging from the corpses of Klausner’s zombies.

  These men were the bitter, the desolate and the dispossessed, men to whom the light of existence had winked out, whose families and livelihoods had been consumed by plague, famine and war. They were men from whom everything had been taken except the hate that boiled within them, that kept their hearts warm and their blood hot.

  They were men who had been only too eager to listen to the witch hunter, to join him on his crusade to purge the Empire by spell, fire and sword. They were men who did not question the hypocrisy of one who burned a witch after stealing her secrets, nor the heresy that seemed so obvious when the man they followed sent lifeless abominations given vitality and motion through the black arts to contend with the mortal attendants of a vampire. They had put aside such questions. They were no longer needed.

  Helmuth Klausner gave them something more important than any moral debate, he gave them a way to lash out, a way to make their hate fulfil itself. Klausner made these men something nobler than simple murderers and thugs, and to question the correctness of his methods was to question the righteousness of the barbarities they performed on his command.

  The dirty-faced rabble of warriors and zealots glared at the carnage strewn all about their leader, at the mangled zombies and the still-dripping bodies of those of Sibbechai’s fold who had yet to breathe their last. Several of the thugs drew daggers and set to hastening the demise of the wounded men.

  One among them, an elderly man with hollow cheeks and steel-grey hair, the soiled white vestment of a priest of Sigmar still fluttering about his spindly form, strode towards the still moving monster at Helmuth’s feet.

  Walther stared down at the vampire, trembling as he saw the necrarch’s unholy orbs look back at him. The old priest stood his ground, however, lifting the long wooden shaft he carried, its end carved into a sharpened point.

  The priest began to pray in a soft and solemn voice, calling upon his god to
guide his hand. Sibbechai stared back, an air of resignation and something that might even have been expectancy seeming to enter the foul creature’s face.

  Walther leaned back, then made to drive the stake into the vampire’s chest, the full weight of the priest’s body behind it. He found his strike foiled, however, as a strong hand closed about the other end of the stake, thwarting its descent. Walther turned his head, finding himself looking into the cold eyes of Helmuth Klausner.

  “No,” the witch hunter told him. “I have hunted this filth too long to let the end be so quick for him.” Helmuth smiled malignantly at the paralysed vampire. “There are things I need from him before I finish with him.”

  Sibbechai felt a flash of rage boil up within its old, cold heart, a ghostly return of the emotions that had run through it before the vampire curse had completely consumed its humanity. By a supreme effort, the vampire lifted its head, mouth dropping open in a snarl of inhuman savagery. “You have already taken everything!” the vampire spat. “My wife! My daughter! My life! There is nothing left, finish it and be damned!”

  The witch hunter’s features spread into an expression of loathsome and ghastly amusement. “Oh yes, dear brother, I most certainly have! I have taken from you everything that you won with your miserable sorcery, everything you tricked and cheated the gods of fortune into tossing into your lap. Your life, your inheritance of our father’s trade contracts, his farms and businesses, awarded to you by the few minutes your sorcerer’s gods made you my elder! And your lovely wife and daughter,” the witch hunter’s lip twisted into a sneer. “She should have been my wife! My child! Only by your heathen magic did you prevail, did you turn her affection for me into hate!”

  “No magic in this world or the next could have done that any better than the cruelty and malice in your heart, Helmuth,” the vampire hissed. “How could she love such a thing as you, a thing of bitterness and envy, coveting everything that was not your own and hating those you could not look down upon. Is it any wonder that a man such as you should rise above the fears of your neighbours, to rise above that fear in order to prey upon it?”