05 - Warrior Priest (8 page)

The room plunged into darkness once more.

The grunting and smashing sounds continued until Ratboy heard Wolff cry out
with pain. As the monster moved back and forth, brief bursts of light crept in
from the outside, and in one such flash he suddenly saw the beast lifting Wolff
from the ground, about to smash him against the wall, swinging him as easily as
a straw doll.

Ratboy tried desperately to rise, but he was still unable to breathe and fell
to his knees again, whimpering pathetically as he crawled towards the two
combatants.

There was a final, deafening
bang
and then silence filled the
chapterhouse.

As Ratboy crawled painfully towards the doorway, the acrid stink of saltpetre
filled his nose and he saw another figure stood just inside the doorway, with a
thin trail of smoke drifting from its raised hand.

“I told you we didn’t need more men,” said von Gryphius, lowering his
flintlock pistol with a high-pitched laugh. The colour had drained from his face
and his eyes were rolling with fear. As he helped Ratboy to his feet his thin
voice sounded slightly hysterical. “What exactly was that?” he asked, gesturing
to the huge mound that lay at his feet.

“Good work, Obermarshall,” came Wolff’s voice from the darkness. He stepped
into the shaft of light coming through the doorway and looked down at the
monster’s body in confusion. “I’m amazed your shot could pierce such a thick
skull.”

Von Gryphius nodded slowly, still staring at the huge corpse in amazement.
“I’m a regular at the Giselbrecht hunt,” he muttered. “And that fellow’s left
eye was conveniently large.”

The ghost of a smile played around Wolff’s lips as he studied
the general, then he took Ratboy’s arm. Once outside, they both fell to the
ground, exhausted. When he had caught his breath, Wolff took the ring from his
robes and looked at it thoughtfully as it glittered in the sunlight. The dove
was stained with the blood of its previous owner. “I must talk with Anna,” he
said.

Recently, Erasmus had begun to speak to the bodies as he worked. He knew it
was a little odd, but with each passing day, he found the mortal world harder to
understand and had come to think of these waxy, shrouded shapes as his friends.
Their stillness comforted him and sometimes he would give them voices; replying
to himself as though the dead were answering. His talk was endless and anodyne:
the changing of the seasons and the consistency of his porridge were the most
regular topics. He doubted the corpses minded though. After all, his were the
last mortal thoughts that would ever be directed at these poor, lost souls.

The garden of Morr at Elghast was a humble temple, but its crypt was a
bewildering maze of tunnels and chambers. The priest’s flickering lamps had only
ever illuminated a small fraction of it. Four generations of his family had
tended the dead in this place, but as far as he knew, no one had ever attempted
to map out the full extent of the catacombs. The limestone arches had once been
ornately carved in the likeness of skulls and black rose petals, but over the
centuries the pillars and cornices had shrugged off their sculpted edges,
reasserting their natural, ragged shapes.

A more inquisitive mind might have wished to explore the distant, ancient
chambers, but not Erasmus. As he performed the funerary rites, he sometimes
heard movements from deeper inside the network of tunnels, and felt obliged to
investigate, but it usually turned out to be nothing more than rats, feasting on
the dead. The rest of the time, he left the rows of crumbling mausoleums alone.

The clapping of large wings announced the arrival of Udo, fluttering in
through the half open door that led back up to the temple. As the raven settled
on her perch, she cawed repeatedly at the black-robed priest, tilting her head
to watch him as he shuffled from corpse to corpse.

“Really?” replied Erasmus, pausing in the act of cleaning a knife to look up
at the bird. “That’s most unfortunate, old girl, but owls have as much right to
eat mice as you do. All creatures have a right to live.” He carefully lifted a
shroud and plunged the knife into something soft and yielding, causing a thin
arc of fluid to patter gently across the stone floor. “At least, for a while
they do.”

He chopped and sliced in silence for a few minutes, frowning in
concentration. Then he paused. “Now then friend, what’s this?” he muttered,
tugging an arrowhead from his subject’s chest with a moist popping sound. He
held the bent piece of metal closer to his lamp and peered at it. “I don’t think
you’ll need this in the afterlife.” He dabbed at the wound with a cloth and
muttered a quick, sonorous prayer, before dropping the arrowhead in a little
copper bowl with a
clang.
“Was it really worth it, I wonder,” he said,
taking a jug of oil from a nearby table and tipping a little onto the corpse’s
chest. As the chamber filled with the scent of rosewater, he shook his head.
“What cause was worth losing everything for, at your age? How old were you
exactly?”

“Early thirties,”
he replied to himself in a deep voice.
“Thirty-five
at most.”

“I see. Old enough to have a family then, maybe, and people who loved you,
but that wasn’t enough—you had to look for something more. Something
exciting.”

“There’s no love out there anymore, father: covetousness, maybe; the desire
for other men’s land; bloodlust perhaps, but no love.”

Erasmus sighed as he continued to anoint the body. “Yes, I suppose you might
be right.” He paused, frowning at something. Then, with another wet
pop,
he removed a second arrowhead. “There certainly doesn’t seem to have been much
love for you.”

He wiped down the second wound and finished applying the scented oil. Then,
placing the knife back in a leather roll, he shuffled across the chamber to a
small recess in the damp rock, filled with a collection of bottles, jugs and
mildewed books. He selected one of the texts and returned to the body, where he
began to pray. He wished the deceased a quick journey to the afterlife and
begged Morr to grant him safe passage.

Natural light hardly reached down into the crypt, but after a few more hours’
work, Erasmus’ stomach announced quite clearly that it was midday. He stroked
his tonsured head and gave a little yawn. “Oh, Udo, I think it might be time for
some lunch.”

The raven gave no reply.

He extinguished all the lamps apart from the one in his hand and fully opened
the door that led back up to the temple, allowing a little more distant, grey
sunlight to penetrate the immemorial gloom. He extinguished his final lamp and
began to climb the rounded steps, holding out his arm for Udo to perch on.
“Bless me!” he exclaimed, slapping his head with his hand and turning around.
“I’m such a doddering old fool. I forgot all about our new guest.” He climbed
back down, relit his small, iron lantern and closed the door again, shuffling
back towards the furthest recesses of the chamber. The single flickering light
picked out a corpse that was such a recent arrival the priest had yet to find a
shroud for it. “I can’t leave you like this all afternoon, now can I?”

“No,”
he replied to himself.
“You should at least show a little
respect for a fellow priest.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry, brother,” he muttered, lifting some muslin from a
shelf as he approached the body. “Are you actually a priest though?” he wondered
aloud, holding the lantern over the remains. The body was that of a wiry old
man, with thin, greasy hair and puckered, weather-beaten skin. “This certainly
seems to suggest you were a man of faith,” he said, holding the light over a
symbol on the old man’s stomach. The sagging folds of skin below his ribs were
branded with the shape of a flaming hammer. “But there’s something about your
expression that makes me wonder.” He stooped until his clouded, myopic eyes were
just an inch or two from the corpse’s face. “There’s something a little wild
about you.”

“I’m a mendicant,”
Erasmus said to himself in the same sonorous voice
he gave all the dead.
“That’s why I look so emaciated.”

“Well, yes, that would explain the sunburned skin too, I suppose, but what
about this injury? It looks to me more like the wound of a soldier, or a fanatic
even. You certainly didn’t get this in a temple.” He moved the lantern across
the body, illuminating a large, ragged hole, just beneath the man’s left
shoulder. “And I suppose this must have been the work of your servant,” he said,
fingering the crude attempts at bandaging.

“You’re a naive old fool,”
Erasmus replied to himself in a deep voice.
“Hiding away in the dark for all these years, as the world turns on its head.
You think that priests don’t get murdered? No one’s safe anymore. Violence is
the only currency people understand in these dark times. You remember what Ernko
said, when he delivered his brother’s remains. The whole of Gumprecht is
consumed with madness—they’ve turned on each other, hunting down their own
families like dogs. They’ve burned their own houses to the ground. All because
they think there’s a heretic somewhere in their midst—someone who might draw
the gaze of the Ruinous Powers in their direction. And remember that ferryman
from Hurdell? He said the people from his village had begun dressing as goats
and eating grass, in the hope it would appease the creatures of the forest and
spare them from attacks. And if that merchant from Ferlangen was correct, half
the cities in the province have fallen to the enemy.”

Erasmus shook his head in surprise as he peeled back the dark, damp rags that
covered the wound. “What kind of weapon did this to you?” he muttered. In truth
though, after the horrors of the last few years, there was little that could
shock the priest anymore, and he began to hum a little ditty to himself as he
worked. He reopened his roll of tools and fetched another bottle of ointment.
Then, he paused. “Looks like you’ve still got something in there, friend,” he
said, peering into the bloody hole. “Is that a splinter of wood?” He took a
small scythe-shaped tool from his roll and slid it into the wound.

The corpse gave out a deafening, tremulous scream.

Its eyes opened wide in terror and one of its sinewy hands shot up, grabbing
Erasmus’ shoulder in a tight grip.

Erasmus dropped the knife to the floor with a clatter and stared back at the
animated corpse in confusion; then he began to scream too. He tried to pull back
from its grasp, but the corpse’s second hand shot up, grabbing him firmly by the
other shoulder.

The corpse’s face was twisted in horror and confusion as it looked from
Erasmus to the surrounding darkness. The vague shapes of the other bodies were
just visible, and the corpse shook its head wildly, before turning back to the
priest. “I’m not dead,” it breathed in a croaky whisper. “For Sigmar’s sake, I’m
alive!”

“I work here mostly on my own,” said Erasmus, shuffling cheerfully in and out
of his bedchamber. “My brother, Bertram, visits occasionally.” His lips twisted
into a grimace. “He only comes to help when he has to, thankfully—only when
there’s too much embalming for me to handle alone. Mind you, that seems to be
more often than not lately.” He lifted Surman up into a sitting position and
handed him a cup of water. “Lately it seems like the dead outnumber the living.”
He chuckled as he pulled open the shutters, filling the small room with flat
grey light. “Another cheerful Ostland day,” he said, watching the autumn rain
slanting across the forest below.

Surman watched him carefully over the top of the cup as he took a gulp of the
water. He immediately spat the liquid out and burst into a series of hacking
coughs, spraying flecks of blood all over the bed’s woollen sheets.

“Be careful,” said Erasmus, dashing to his side and snatching the cup from
him. “You need to drink it slowly.” He shook his head and gently patted Surman’s
bony, hunched back. “It’s a miracle you’re alive. That wound must have missed
your heart by an inch.” Once the coughing fit had passed, he handed the cup back
and sat on a stool next to the window. “Your man brought you to me certain that
you were dead.” Erasmus looked at the floor to hide his embarrassment. “There
are various tests I would have performed before beginning the embalming, of
course. I was just going to remove a couple of the splinters.”

Surman sipped the water again, carefully this time, and he managed to hold it
down. His hollow, stubbly cheeks were still as grey as the rain clouds rushing
past the window, but his breath was coming a little easier now, and he was
beginning to think he might even survive. “Who brought me here?” he asked in a
strained whisper.

Erasmus’ long, pale face lit up with a smile. “You sound so much better!” He
clasped his tapered fingers together and muttered a prayer. “My skills as a
healer are rarely called upon. It’s been a long time since I practiced herb
lore. I wasn’t sure if that poultice would be powerful enough to draw out the
illness.” He shook his head in amazement. “You’re made of sterner stuff than you
look, old man.”

No hint of emotion crossed Surman’s face. He took a slow breath and then
repeated his words a little louder. “Who brought me here?”

The eager smile remained on Erasmus’ face as he replied. “As I said, it was
your man.” He looked up at the ceiling and drummed his fingers on his knees. “I
think he said his name was Albrecht or Adolphus, or—”

“Adelman,” interrupted Surman, with a note of impatience in his voice.

“Yes! That’s the one. He’d travelled with you for days, trying to find help,
but he’d finally given up hope of reviving you.” Erasmus narrowed his eyes and
looked back at Surman. “He seemed eager to leave. As though he were worried I
would ask him the reasons for your condition.” He shrugged. “But the truth is,
my friend, the actions of the living are rarely Morr’s concern. Whatever we do
in life, we all reach the same destination.”