[Mathias Thulmann 01] - Witch Hunter Read online

  The vampire’s eyes gleamed with contempt. “Tell me, Helmuth, did any priest ordain you to torture and burn innocent women and children, or did Sigmar himself call down to you and tell you to become a monster?”

  Wrath blazed up in the witch hunter’s face for a moment, but swiftly faded into a cold and malicious spite. Helmuth sneered down at the vampire. “Oh, I did more than torture that slut you chose to pollute our name,” the witch hunter declared, a note of pride in his voice. “I waited until you had gone, of course, to confer with your sorcerer friends. Then I denounced her, her and her daughter. Denounced them as witches before the whole town.”

  The witch hunter chuckled with sinister mirth. “You know, not one of them spoke a word in her defence. That rabble you so loved and helped with your heathen magics, your elf lore and pagan prayers. Not one of them dared to defy me, for they saw that justice was within me. And before justice, no unclean thing can prevail!”

  The vampire struggled against the power that pressed upon its limbs, struggled to rise and rend the gloating figure of its hated enemy. But it was a struggle the monster could not win. Helmuth watched Sibbechai’s desperate movements for a time, then continued his tormenting.

  “I am impressed,” the witch hunter mused in a thoughtful tone. “I had imagined that all the humanity would have burned itself out of that rotting carcass of yours some time ago. Don’t tell me that there is still enough of my…” the witch hunter paused, putting such an emphasis on the next word that it seemed to explode from his mouth, “little brother that he still feels some connection with that slut of his? Would it anger him to know that the favours she chose to deny me and bestow upon you are not unknown to me now?” The witch hunter laughed again as he saw the enraged vampire struggle once more to rise. Walther cast a nervous look at the vampire, then at his leader, uncertain which of the two was the greater menace.

  “She was most forthcoming,” Helmuth continued. “One might even say eager. I spent many a happy night before I tired of her incessant begging and pleading.” The witch hunter shook his head. “I can’t understand why you were so devoted to that boring cow. But, it might lift your spirits to know that they died together.”

  Helmuth laughed. “A single pyre is so much more economical,” he stated. Sibbechai growled, the creature’s immobile claws scratching deep into the cobbles. A stern expression came upon the witch hunter.

  “Don’t deceive yourself, monster,” he snarled. “You are no longer my brother Hessrich! You did not drive me from Gruebelhof, pursue me across the Empire, follow me into this place of horror and madness simply to avenge that carrion.”

  The witch hunter pulled open a heavy leather satchel that hung from a strap across his chest. From it he removed a mass of paper and parchment, held together by an array of string and leather cords.

  Helmuth brandished it before the vampire, watching with satisfaction as Sibbechai’s eyes narrowed with lust and desire. “Yes,” Helmuth cooed. The book you brought back to Gruebelhof after your accident. Of course, I have added to it since then, added to it with the rites and spells of a dozen sorcerers, the hexes and charms of a score of witches. But this is no longer some coffin-worm’s grimoire, nor some magister’s tome of profane lore! This is Das Buch die Unholden, Helmuth Klausner’s book of unholy things, his weapon against the powers of Old Night! I shall not use this vile tome as you would, vampire! I shall use it to give glory and honour to Sigmar, to destroy those who would mock and profane his holy name!”

  Helmuth drew a deep breath, calming himself after his tirade. The witch hunter glanced aside, finding that his minions were staring at him. He gestured at the vampire. “Seize it!” he snapped. “Bind it!”

  The witch hunter smiled as he watched his men overcome their hesitance and fall upon the vampire, winding chains of silver about its withered limbs. Iron spikes were driven into the cobbles, the chains wrapped round them. The men strained at their task, extending the vampire’s limbs, forcing the monster to spread itself upon the ground.

  The witch hunter nodded in satisfaction as he saw his followers complete their labour, retreating back in revulsion and fear as the vampire snarled up at them.

  “Such a work,” Helmuth said, rubbing his hand across the weathered pages, “should have a proper setting, don’t you think? I have seen for myself that necromancers choose to enshrine their despicable secrets within covers of human skin. It should only be fitting then to entomb my great work within the hide of one of the loathsome monsters that threatens Sigmar’s noble Empire.” Helmuth turned away, pointing to one of the most brutal looking of his henchmen, a grizzled bear of a man dressed in furs and mud. “Skin it,” he ordered the warrior.

  Walther grabbed the arm of his leader, flinching away when he saw the look of anger in his master’s eyes. “You can’t do such a thing!” he protested. “That sorry creature was your brother! Whatever it has become, surely you can extend it some small measure of mercy?”

  The priest understood that the monster needed to be destroyed, but the savage horror of what Helmuth intended sickened him even more than anything else he had been witness to since joining up with the witch hunter. “Even the most pious of Sigmar’s champions can show pity. Destroy it, yes, but not this way.”

  Helmuth Klausner’s voice was like the cackle of one of the Dark Gods. “Destroy it?” he laughed. “I am rather hoping that it does not die. Some of the nosferatu are capable of suffering hideous injuries before meeting their end. I hope to amuse myself with this creature for quite some time.” The witch hunter laughed again as he saw the skinner cut away the tatters of Sibbechai’s robe. The crescent-shaped knife sank into the vampire’s rotten skin, flaying it from the flesh beneath.

  A low howl of anguish rose from the undead creature.

  “Destroy it?” Helmuth gave the priest an incredulous look. “I’ve not even started with it yet!”

  It was in the long dark hours when all was quiet and still that Walther crept his way toward the place where the vampire had been left.

  It had taken many hours for Helmuth’s men to fall asleep, revelling in their leader’s victory. The witch hunter himself had retired to his own room within a half-collapsed tavern, there to consult his tome of sorcery. There had been no one to watch Walther go, no guard to prevent his departure. Yet it had taken many hours more for the old priest to justify what he intended, struggling to overcome beliefs that had been branded into his soul and the last lingering traces of faith and loyalty some dark part of him still felt towards Helmuth Klausner.

  The witch hunter was mad. Walther had known it for quite some time, if he was fully honest with himself. It was only now, however, that he had the courage to accept the fact.

  He had followed Helmuth for two years, at first believing that the witch hunter’s plan to drive the pawns of the Ruinous Powers from the Empire by employing their own profane arts against them. He had believed because he knew the nature of those wizards and warlocks he had seen, selfish men who pursued their own interests, whether knowledge or power, with a reckless abandon, contemptuous of the gods and their fellow man. But Helmuth had been different, a man who had within him a great and zealous devotion to Sigmar.

  Walther had believed in the witch hunter, believed his claims that a righteous man could bend the twisted powers of sorcery and use it in the name of justice and good.

  Walther could only shake his head at his former naiveté. He had watched the foul knowledge Helmuth had collected consume the witch hunter, twisting him into the very likeness of those he hunted. He had watched as the corrupt power devoured the witch hunter a bit more every day.

  What might he become if left to continue as he was? Would the evil of his outrages be any less for being consecrated to Sigmar? Or did it make them worse, fouler even than the devotions of depraved Chaos cultists and witches?

  The old priest had seen far too much of Helmuth’s black power, knew only too well the profane forces the witch hunter could command. It terrified hi
m, for all his faith in Sigmar. He knew that he could not challenge Helmuth on his own. He did not have the courage or the faith. He worried that at the last moment, some fragment of his former loyalty to the man would assert itself and stay his hand, delay the fatal blow. Then the witch hunter would destroy him, and Walther shuddered as he considered how inventive the man would be when dealing with one who had betrayed him.

  Walther stared at the unmoving figure that lay sprawled upon the street, arms and legs made fast to iron spikes driven deep into the cobbles.

  He hesitated, trembling as he recalled the monster’s screams. Perhaps it was already dead, perhaps he had risked discovery and damnation for nothing. No man could have survived what Helmuth had put the vampire through, no mortal could have endured such pain for hours on end. And even if it yet lived, how could it possibly have strength enough left within it to help him?

  The old priest closed his eyes, whispering a prayer to Sigmar that he might have guidance, that he might be shown what to do. When Walther opened his eyes, he felt an impulse to run, to flee the accursed and damned rubble of Mordheim. The old priest turned to do just that, but a slight change in the vampire’s shadowy figure caused him to hesitate.

  Two glowing eyes were staring at him from the vampire’s mangled form, shining out at him with a cold wrath. Walther stared back, feeling the faint traces of the monster’s aura of fear prickle his skin and crawl along his spine. Sibbechai lived, and Helmuth might still be stopped. The priest walked toward the silent shadowy mass, feeling his stomach turn as he saw what remained of the vampire, a dry mass of bare meat and muscle, like the carcass of a dried-out toad. Sibbechai stared up at the priest, its stripped face incapable of any sort of expression.

  “Come to finish my brother’s labours?” a dry voice wheezed from the vampire’s mouth. Despite the horror of its mutilated tones, Walther could detect a hopeful ring to Sibbechai’s words.

  The priest noticed for the first time that he held his long wooden stake at the ready, poised to thrust it into the vampire’s chest. He smiled weakly, lowering his weapon. “No,” he said at length. “Only Sigmar can grant you peace,” he added with a note of genuine sympathy and regret.

  “If Sigmar has chosen a man such as Helmuth Klausner as the instrument of his will, then I pity man,” Sibbechai sighed. The vampire stared intently at the expression that came upon Walther’s face. “You know what he is, I can see it in your eyes. I am a monster,” Sibbechai stated, “but how much more so is my brother? He clothes his horror within the cloak of justice and beneath the banner of righteousness, but is he truly so different from what I have become?” The vampire might have smiled had it understood how directly and precisely it had read the troubling doubts boiling within the old priest’s mind.

  “Helmuth Klausner serves the Empire, serves holy Sigmar,” the priest declared as he fought to regain his composure. “He turns the powers of the enemy against themselves, fighting the fires of corruption with their own flame.” The vampire hissed with bitter laughter.

  “Is that so? Your noble champion serves Sigmar?” Sibbechai’s mangled form shuddered with the force of its anguished mirth. “Then tell me why I find him here? I did not follow your master to Mordheim, I waited for him. I knew he would come here, come here to harvest the wyrdstone. To use it to attempt a thing no sorcerer or necromancer has ever dared to contemplate.”

  The vampire itself seemed to shiver with fear as it thought about the dark purpose that had drawn Helmuth Klausner to Mordheim. The old priest turned pale at the mention of wyrd-stone, for the witch hunter had indeed been gathering as many of the greenish-black shards of rock as he could find. But unlike the mercenary rabble who conducted their own wyrdstone hunts through the ruins, Walther knew that Helmuth had no patron waiting to buy the stones from him.

  “Helmuth seeks only to cleanse this land of its pollution, to drive corruption from the Empire,” Walther insisted, fighting against his own doubts and fears.

  “In his diseased way, that is what he hopes to do,” Sibbechai said. “He would burn the field to save the crop.” The vampire’s hiss dropped into a whisper. “I know what it is that he stole from me, I know the ancient secrets he learned from my book!”

  “You do not frighten me,” Walther swore at the monster, brandishing once more the wooden stake. The vampire shook its head slightly, all the movement it could manage.

  “Then you are a fool,” it told him. “For your master has had time enough to decipher that book, to unlock its most terrible lore. I tell you, Helmuth Klausner came to Mordheim with one purpose: he means to recreate the Great Ritual of Nagash!”

  The wooden stake fell from the priest’s hands, clattering upon the cobbles. Walther recoiled in horror as he heard the vampire whisper the ancient and blighted name of the First Necromancer, the undying father of the undead.

  He staggered as the enormity of what Sibbechai had suggested struck him. The Great Ritual, a dark fable that was still whispered on winter nights, an event of such atrocity and infamy that its echoes still resonated through the souls of men, a story that was still remembered by men who had never even heard of the lands where it had unfolded.

  The Great Ritual, the apocalyptic spell by which Nagash had destroyed the kingdoms of Nehekhara and transformed them for all time into the Land of the Dead, the spell through which he had slain every man, woman, child and beast then resurrected them as soulless abominations to walk the barren wastes until the ending of the world. Walther felt sickened even by the possibility that such knowledge had not been purged from all existence with Sigmar’s smiting of the Black One.

  “I heard Helmuth,” Walther snarled at the vampire. “You hunted him here to reclaim your filthy book. You intend to work this abominable spell yourself!”

  “I waited because I knew that he must come here,” Sibbechai corrected the old priest. “I came here to avenge the outrages he committed upon my wife and daughter.” The vampire’s voice seethed with rage as it spoke. “I have hunted Helmuth all these years for revenge, not for some tome of cursed and blasphemous knowledge!”

  The priest glared down at the monster, considering its words. At last Walther nodded to himself, drawing a dagger from his belt. “You will help me to stop Helmuth if I release you?” the old priest asked, his voice quivering from the disgust he felt at what he was doing. The vampire nodded its head as much as it could. “When it is finished, you understand that I cannot let you live,” the priest added.

  “When Helmuth is dead,” Sibbechai told him, “there will no longer be any reason for me to live. I will not hinder you from doing what must be done.”

  The priest leaned downward, gripping one of the silver chains. He pressed the edge of his dagger against it, then hesitated, staring at the vampire once more. “How can I be certain that you will honour your word?” he demanded.

  “I swear by Sigmar, who I worshipped when I yet drew breath,” the vampire told him. Then, in a softer, pitiable voice it added, “But if that does not bind me to you, then I shall swear upon the souls of my wife and child that I shall work no harm upon you.” Walther bowed his head, accepting the conviction and misery in the vampire’s tones. He set to sawing through the silver links.

  “The bullet,” Sibbechai hissed. “It drains me of strength. Cut it from me first, or I can be of no use to you. If I am too weak to help you, you must leave the chains, leave me to Helmuth.” A growl of hate rumbled up from the vampire. “Only promise me that even without my help, you will strike down the heretic!”

  Walther rose from attacking the chain. He stared into the vampire’s ruined face, seeing for the first time not a soulless monster, but a cursed and tormented man. He nodded his head, feeling a new strength flow through him. “I promise it. I promise on my faith in holy Sigmar that Helmuth Klausner will answer for all he has done.” The priest knelt beside Sibbechai, staring now at the gory hole that had bored and burned its way into the meat of the vampire’s shoulder. He looked over at Sibbechai’s fa
ce. “I suspect this is going to hurt,” he commented.

  The vampire clenched its jaws against the agony that flashed through its ravaged body as Walther’s knife probed into the wound.

  It was some minutes later when Walther rose from his gruesome labour. The lack of blood had somehow added to the horror of the operation as the vampire’s collapsed veins shed not a drop of fluid as the priest’s blade worried its way past them. The priest held the gold bullet before his face, wondering how so small a thing might bring low so dreadful a being as a vampire.

  The priest’s face contorted with an ironic smile. This dreadful being was now his only ally against a man he had once called friend and mentor. Strange indeed were the twisted paths of fate.

  “It is done,” he said, tossing the bullet away. “Do you feel any change?” The question died unanswered as Walther turned back towards the vampire.

  Sibbechai had leapt to its feet the instant the old priest’s attention had wavered, ripping the iron spikes from the cobbles with inhuman strength. Sibbechai whipped one of the silver chains dangling from his wrists towards Walther, the heavy iron spike fixed to the end of the chain length smashing into the side of the priest’s skull.

  The man fell to the cobbles and in an instant the vampire was upon him, strangling the life from the old man with one of the chains, ignoring the burning wracking pain that sizzled into it every time the naked meat of its palms touched the metal. In a brutally short time, the priest’s body grew slack. Sibbechai let the man’s corpse slump into the street, Walther’s neck nearly cut clean through by the action of the chain upon his flesh. The vampire stared hungrily at the puddles of blood that had already drained out from the corpse. It fell on its hands and knees and began to lap the crimson liquid from the filthy cobbles.