Necromancer (14 page)

Neither of them felt particularly confident about their
chosen course of action, but they had come this far. Just a few more steps and
they would be at the house. What harm could that do? They advanced into the
narrow street together and approached the dead-eyed house.

“There’s a plaque here,” Erich said in a harsh whisper. “Next
to the door.”

“What does it say?” Dieter asked.

“I can’t make it out. Whatever name was written here has been
scratched out.”

Dieter made no further comment, but the defaced plaque only
served to add to his sense of unease.

The house was in an obvious state of decay and it was this
fact that provided them with a way in. It was Erich who found the loose shutter
and the rotten window behind it on the first floor. With both of them balancing
on the roof of an abutting lean-to belonging to a neighbouring derelict house,
the students were able to reach the window. It did not take much to force the
latch, the wood of the casement splintering wetly around the rusted iron
fitting.

“Come on,” Erich said, the moonlight reflecting madly from
his eyes, “give me a leg up.”

Dieter was not entirely sure what is was that made him cup
his hands for Erich to push his body up and in through the window, or what it
was that meant he then allowed himself to be pulled inside too, rather than turn
tail and flee right there and then. As he stood in the all but pitch-black room
beyond, he tried to tell himself that it was merely alcohol-fuelled bravado and
nothing more. To admit that it might be anything more than that was to invite an
uncomfortable degree of introspection and mental self-exploration.

Inside, the property was as rundown as it appeared from the
outside. The room they found themselves in was lacking any furniture whatsoever.
The floorboards were bare, bristling with splinters; the walls damp, flaking
plaster. Erich, recovering some of his former courage, led the way out of the
room.

Beyond they found themselves on an equally bleak landing. A
staircase ran both up to a floor above and downstairs, the banister staves
broken or entirely missing in places. There was a musty smell of mildew in the
air around them. It seemed as if no one had lived here for a very long time, and
yet he had seen the two body snatchers admitted by a manservant of some
description only last month.

Erich peered up the next flight of stairs to the darkness of
the floor above. Satisfied that there was no danger likely to come from that
direction, he looked cautiously over the edge of the banisters. Dieter did the
same.

Light from a street lamp entering the building from outside
through the slats of a shuttered window barely made the floor below visible to
them. The passageway below was laid with interlocking tiles which might once
have been black and white but which were now a uniform grey-brown, thanks to the
layers of dirt that had been allowed to besmirch them.

Erich led the way forward, along the landing, keeping his
back flat against the wall and as far from the staircase banisters as possible.
Two other doors led off to rooms on this floor, one directly ahead and one to
the left. The panels of the doors were scratched, their varnish peeling.

Any haze of alcohol had been cleared from the inquisitive
apprentices’ minds by the adrenaline now racing round their bodies at the
thought of exploring the sepulchral house. Erich stopped outside the first door.
No light spilled from underneath it. Pressing himself close against the jamb, he
turned the handle and pushed the door open. Hinges groaned in protest. Erich
froze.

There was a noise like footsteps, but had it come from the
alleyway beyond the window through which they had broken in, or from somewhere
inside the house?

The two students waited for several long, anxious moments.
Dieter had never felt so on edge, so exhilarated.

Hearing nothing else, at long last Erich peered into the
room. His jaw dropped open and he stepped inside. Dieter followed. Once they
were both inside Erich pushed the door to again. Then he spoke for the first
time since they had entered the deathly house.

“Will you look at this?” he whispered excitedly.

Dieter just stood agog, staring. One of the room’s windows
was unshuttered and wan moonlight lit the chamber with its eerie, unearthly
luminescence. In that light the layout and contents of the room could be seen
quite clearly.

Rows of bookshelves covered every wall of the room. This had
to be the owner’s private library. The only other piece of furniture in the room
was an ink-stained, leather-topped writing desk but this appeared as old and
neglected as the rest of the fabric of the house. Resting on its surface, rather
disconcertingly, was a human skull.

Dieter suspected that the rarity of some of the books kept
here could rival those of the physicians’ guild library itself. Dieter was in a
state of rapture. Imagine what knowledge would be available here to one who
wanted to improve his knowledge of the human body and all its ills, and improve
his chances of healing that same assemblage of organs?

Dieter scanned the shelves, reading the spines of the volumes
collected there. Some, like Hampfner’s
Herbs of the Mootland and their Uses
and the Tilean text known simply as the
Medicina,
he recognised. Others
were entirely new to him. There was Nemilos’
Ars Immortalis
and
Burial Rites of the Unberogens.

Then there were other books whose titles were written in
languages he didn’t understand and some using alphabets he didn’t even
recognise. There was something labelled in a calligraphic script that Dieter
believed was from the far away, mystical kingdom of Araby that lay across the
sea beyond the lands of the Border Princes. And there weren’t just books; there
were scrolls as well, and even, most curiously, a broken baked clay tablet
covered in markings that looked like crude pictograms.

Dieter reached up and took an untitled volume down from a
shelf.

“What are you doing?” Erich hissed.

“You were the one who suggested we take a closer look,”
Dieter replied in a whisper.

He opened the book. It smelt musty and damp. Spots of mould
patterned the pages of the book. The title page was printed in a heavy, gothic
type but the language appeared to be Bretonnian. Written on the flyleaf in a
dated, over-fussy script was a name: Drakus. For want of an alternative Dieter
took it that Drakus was the name of the individual whose library this was.

“It would appear our mysterious, progressive doktor has a
name,” he whispered to his companion, who had crossed back to the door and was
peering through the gap at the landing beyond.

“What?”

“It would seem that this house belongs to one Doktor Drakus.”

“What was that?” Erich suddenly hissed, peering through the
gap in the half-open door.

Dieter froze, the book open in his hands. What was it Erich
had heard? So engrossed was he in the book he held in his hands he had heard
nothing. Neither of them moved nor spoke, ears straining for the slightest
sound.

Nothing.

Dieter carefully replaced the slim volume into its place on
the shelf.

Erich was getting nervous, his former bravado having
evaporated entirely now that he was actually inside the house of Doktor Drakus.
Strangely, Dieter was beginning to feel more relaxed the longer they stayed.
Disturbingly, he almost felt at home in the moonlit library.

“We’ve seen enough. Let’s go,” Erich whispered, looking
sidelong at Dieter but not daring to move from his position at the door.

But Dieter did not want to leave. He was fascinated by the
library and its collection of seemingly morbid and macabre books.

“I heard something!” Erich hissed. “For Sigmar’s sake, we
need to go now!”

Dieter listened. There was another echo of a creak outside
the room.

Erich pulled open the library door and edged out onto the
landing again, casting one last desperate look of exasperation at the curiously
intense, pale young man.

Dieter heard another creak. Someone was coming up the stairs.

His eyes locked on the spine of
Leichemann’s Anatomy
and the plain, scuffed black leather book on the shelf next to it. His heart
raced. His mind whirled.

And then he was tucking the two volumes inside the front of
his robe and dashing from the room, hardly daring to let his feet touch the
floor in case the floorboards creaked under his weight and gave him away.

Then he was back in the first room in the house they had
entered, following Erich out of the broken window. He dropped into the alley
behind the house from the roof of the lean-to. And then the two of them were
sprinting away as if their very lives were in peril, back through the clinging
mists that swathed the streets, back past the Cutpurse’s Hands and back to Frau
Keeler’s lodging house in Dunst Strasse.

They did not stop to draw breath until they were back in
their garret apartment, the door slammed shut behind them and the bolt thrown
home.

From that moment on Dieter found himself living in a
heightened state of anxiety, expecting the watch, or worse still Krieger’s witch
hunters, to turn up on his doorstep at any moment, having somehow got word of
the theft from the house in Apothekar Allee, and knowing him to be responsible.

What if, as Erich had first proposed, this Doktor Drakus was
nothing more than a physician whose progressive practices had denied him
acceptance by the guild? What if he were guilty of nothing more than showing a
little ingenuity and perseverance in the face of adversity? And Dieter had
stolen from him, something that was completely out of character for him.

Dieter dared not leave the lodging house now, so fearful had
his own paranoid imaginings made him. Erich had taken to his bed with a bottle
of cheap hock for company on their return from their night’s escapade and didn’t
emerge again until more than a day had passed.

But Dieter was not idle during his self-imposed
incarceration. Living on a stale loaf, a hard lump of cheese and the occasional
bowl of vegetable broth that a concerned Frau Keeler began to bring up to him
after two days had passed—concerned that the young medical student was himself
pining for something that he no doubt picked up tending to the sick—he began
to pour over the two volumes he had taken from the house of Doktor Drakus.

The plain, black leather book was the chronicle of one
scholar’s search for the lost knowledge of the Nehekharans and although it made
interesting reading, it did not really teach Dieter anything very useful.
Leichemann’s Anatomy,
on the other hand, fascinated him and he had to admit
that he found the concepts and detailed information it contained easy to digest
and integrate with his own knowledge. In fact, he seemed to have a strange
affinity for the ideas presented within the book. He put that down to the long
association he had had with death, growing up in Hangenholz as the son of a
priest of the mortuary cult of Morr.

After a week, with no sudden and unexpected visits from the
watch, or worse, Dieter braved being out and about in the town again. He even
dared return to the guild to continue his work there. When Doktor Hirsch asked
where he had been, Dieter told him that he had been suffering from a heavy
summer cold. Lying was something else he wasn’t used to doing quite so
blatantly.

Hirsch backed away from him abruptly at that admission and
said, “You want to be careful that it’s not something more serious.” The elderly
physician took a flask from the shelf behind him that was cluttered with all
manner of jars and bottles. “Here, drink this tincture. I’ve heard talk that
there is plague in Stirland.”

He watched as Dieter downed the contents of the flask, making
sure every last drop was consumed. Then, apparently satisfied that Dieter was no
longer infectious or a danger to his own health, set him to work grinding
popping seeds.

But Dieter no longer spent every hour possible studying in
the guild library or with Doktor Hirsch in his laboratory. Instead, when he had
some spare time, no matter if it was even only an hour between lectures, Dieter
would return to his lodgings and the private study he was making there of
Leichemann’s Anatomy.

On the thirtieth day of Sommerzeit, Dieter was making notes
on a chapter entitled
Of the Dismemberment of Rats
when there was a loud
knock at his door.

For a moment all of his previous worries that he might have
attracted the attentions of the authorities by his breaking and entering
escapade resurfaced. He glanced at the dormer window in his room but knew that
realistically there was no escape from the attic room that way.

The knock came again: three loud raps.

He couldn’t not answer the door—he was the only one home—as whoever it was without might only break it down anyway, in which case he’d
have no way of keeping them out. He would have to talk to whoever was there and
put them off that way.

Dieter fumbled the book and his own notebook closed, then
pulled a drift of parchment drawings over them. Taking a deep breath he crossed
the shared dining room and opened the door a crack.

Leopold Hanser was standing at the top of the stairs. He
looked almost angry.

“There you are,” the blond-haired student said, the annoyance
apparent in his voice. “What are you doing stuck in here?”

“I-I’m studying,” Dieter replied.

“But you’ve missed another lecture at the guild.”

“Another? I wasn’t aware I had missed any.”

“Doktor Hirsch said you’d been feeling under the weather. He
wanted to know if you’d been to Stirland recently.”

“What? No,” Dieter said, bewildered. His thoughts were still
back with the volume on his desk. At that moment he wasn’t even quite sure what
time of day it was, and he couldn’t be certain which day of the week it was
either.